AI/ML Data Engineer

Data Engineer  / AI-ML Engineer (Contract)
Location: Phoenix, AZ 
Duration: 12-month contract
Experience Level: Senior / Expert
Interview Process: 1 round
Drug Test: Required

Locals  who are in Arizona only prefered

Key Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and maintain Python-based services and REST APIs for AI/ML applications.
• Build production-grade REST APIs from scratch, with a focus on scalability, reliability, and performance.
• Collaborate with data science and ML teams to integrate and optimize machine learning and LLM-based models.
• Support model deployment, monitoring, and data processing workflows.
• Write clean, well-tested, maintainable code following best engineering practices.
• Contribute to CI/CD pipelines and continuous improvements in code quality and system performance.

Required Qualifications

• 4 years of hands-on Python development experience, with strong software engineering fundamentals.
• Proven experience building production-ready REST APIs from the ground up.
• Solid understanding of CI/CD pipelines and version control (Git).
• Hands-on experience with SQL and data manipulation.
• knowledge of Machine Learning concepts, including LLMs, NLP, or Generative AI.
• Knowledge with ML frameworks such as scikit-learn, TensorFlow, or PyTorch.

Preferred / Nice-to-Have Skills

• Exposure to MLOps, including model deployment and monitoring in production.
• Experience with containerization (Docker).
• Familiarity with CI/CD automation tools.
• Experience working with open-source LLMs (e.g., Llama 3); exposure to OpenAI models is a plus.