AI Engineer, R&D

Church & Dwight is hiring an AI Engineer for its R&D Agentic Pod team to design, build, deploy, and scale AI-powered products that support R&D decision-making. The position centers on large language models, generative AI, and production-ready retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and agentic workflows.

Responsibilities

• Translate R&D business needs into secure, scalable AI products that combine approved enterprise knowledge, structured and unstructured data, models, tools, permissions, and human oversight.
• Design, build, test, deploy, and maintain LLM and generative AI applications, agentic workflows, and orchestration patterns for planning, routing, tool use, memory, handoffs, and human-in-the-loop controls.
• Build and optimize RAG systems using vector databases, embeddings, chunking, indexing, metadata, hybrid search, reranking, grounding, and source attribution, including traceable ingestion and refresh processes.
• Develop reusable production prompts and integrations for generative AI APIs, enterprise services, applications, analytical models, workflow tools, and knowledge repositories.
• Create automated and human evaluations to assess accuracy, groundedness, safety, relevance, task completion, latency, cost, and usability, and monitor quality, adoption, incidents, and business outcomes.
• Identify hallucination, prompt injection, tool, retrieval, and operational risks, then implement guardrails, fallbacks, authentication, authorization, logging, secrets management, and data controls.
• Apply strong software engineering practices, including modular design, source control, code review, automated testing, documentation, release management, observability, and production support.
• Partner with R&D, Quality, Regulatory, Data Science, GTA, architecture, data engineering, platform, security, privacy, and governance teams from discovery and prototyping through deployment, training, adoption, and continuous improvement.
• Ensure alignment with enterprise architecture, privacy, security, legal compliance, data governance, and responsible AI standards, documenting architecture, controls, dependencies, procedures, limitations, and intended use.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Data Science, Artificial Intelligence, Engineering, Information Systems, or a related technical discipline (informa).
• 3+ years of experience in software engineering, machine learning engineering, AI engineering, data engineering, or a related discipline.
• Hands-on experience building LLM and generative AI applications, including production prompt engineering, structured outputs, tool calling, model selection, APIs, evaluation, testing, monitoring, and optimization.
• Experience building enterprise RAG solutions with vector databases, embeddings, retrieval pipelines, knowledge sources, hybrid retrieval, reranking, grounding, and source attribution.
• Experience with agent frameworks, workflow orchestration, routing, handoffs, memory patterns, and human-in-the-loop controls.
• Proficiency in Python, REST APIs and SDKs, cloud AI services, source control, automated testing, authentication, and authorization.

Key Technologies

• Python, REST APIs, SDKs, cloud AI services
• Vector databases, embeddings, hybrid search, reranking, grounding, source attribution
• Authentication, authorization, source control, automated testing, logging, secrets management

Collaboration and Success Measures

The AI Engineer, R&D will work with R&D, Quality, and Regulatory stakeholders, AI Champions, Data Scientists, GTA partners, and enterprise architecture, security, data engineering, and platform teams. Performance is assessed through solution quality, accuracy, reliability, security, maintainability, user adoption, business impact, and cost and latency performance, along with delivery of reusable generative AI capabilities.

Education and Additional Experience

• Master’s degree in Software Engineering, Data Science, Artificial Intelligence, Engineering, Information Systems, or a related technical discipline (preferred).
• Experience integrating AI solutions with enterprise applications, data platforms, security controls, and governed knowledge repositories.
• Experience in Consumer Packaged Goods R&D, Quality, and/or Regulatory environments.
• Strong systems thinking, business acumen, product mindset, prioritization, problem-solving, data-driven storytelling, collaboration, curiosity, accountability, and ability to influence without authority in ambiguous environments.

Skills and Competencies

• Action-oriented, data-driven problem solver focused on measurable outcomes.
• Strategic systems thinker with strong technical, business, and product acumen.
• Collaborative, curious, and accountable; effective in ambiguity and influencing without authority.

Work Environment

Location: Princeton, NJ (hybrid). In-person attendance is required on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, with remote work options on Mondays and Fridays.

Compensation and Benefits

Salary range: $71,000 to $101,100 USD per year for this full-time position.

• Eligible for a bonus
• Medical, dental, vision
• Basic life insurance
• Paid vacation and sick time
• Paid Parental Leave
• Paid holidays, floating holidays, and vacation days starting in their first year of employment depending on hire date
• 401k retirement plan (with company match and profit-sharing)
• Discounted Employee Stock Purchase Plan

The actual base pay offered will be based on job-related knowledge and skills, experience, business needs, geographical location, and internal pay parity.