Senior AI Engineer I

RWE Americas is hiring a Senior AI Engineer I to help deliver end-to-end AI capabilities that move from design and build into production operations. This hands-on role spans retrieval and context assembly, model and agentic logic, system integration, evaluation and monitoring, and ongoing operational runbook maintenance, with an emphasis on trustworthiness through testing and AI-specific security and responsible AI controls.

Role overview

You will own AI functionality within a product or across multiple products, covering the full lifecycle of AI capabilities. The scope includes decisions on when to use machine learning versus simpler statistical baselines, building enterprise retrieval pipelines, designing evaluation systems (including automated methods), and maintaining production readiness through runbooks and regression testing.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, operate, and own end-to-end AI capabilities, including retrieval and context assembly, model and agentic logic, integration with source systems and consuming applications, monitoring and evaluation, and operational runbook maintenance
• Train and evaluate ML models for well-scoped problems such as classification, regression, anomaly detection, clustering, and forecasting using operational and commercial data, including guidance on ML versus statistical baselines
• Build retrieval and context pipelines for enterprise content using chunking, tagging, and a metadata strategy, and measure retrieval quality against an agreed standard
• Design and maintain evaluation for AI capabilities, including offline evaluations, automated scoring such as LLM-as-judge, and regression tests that run on every prompt or pipeline change to ensure quality prior to release; monitor quality and drift in production
• Own inference cost and latency in production, tracking cost per transaction and end-to-end response time, profiling where time is spent, and making tradeoffs to meet agreed targets
• Implement human-in-the-loop and AI-specific security controls, including shadow and assisted modes, confidence and citation surfaces, override capture, audit trails, identity-scoped retrieval, input and output guardrails, tool permissions, and prompt injection resistance
• Take handover of application components delivered by technical delivery partners by reviewing code, closing operational gaps, updating the runbook, and maintaining components in production
• Improve team efficiency through reusable components and reference examples, code review, and onboarding support for new engineers

Required qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, data science, another STEM field, or a related discipline
• Minimum 5 years of relevant experience in software or AI/ML engineering roles with demonstrated ownership of AI or ML capabilities end to end in a production environment
• Depth in two or three of the AI capability areas described above, with working familiarity across the rest
• Production experience with Python and SQL, a major cloud platform, version control and code review, containerized deployment, and CI/CD for AI products and services
• Hands-on experience with current orchestration, agent, and retrieval frameworks
• Practical experience developing ML models for supervised and unsupervised problems
• Experience building and maintaining evaluation and regression testing for AI and ML systems
• Working knowledge of AI-specific security and responsible AI controls
• Competent use of coding agents and other AI-assisted tooling, including task scoping, reviewing generated code, and identifying tasks unsuitable for delegation
• Experience with IT/OT environments, industrial data sources, or operational technology systems is preferred
• Experience in the power, utilities, or clean energy sector, including knowledge of U.S. power markets, renewable project development, and clean energy technologies is preferred

Technologies

• Python, SQL, APIs, MCPs
• CI/CD, LLM-as-judge, machine learning
• Cloud platform, containerized deployment
• Orchestration frameworks, agent frameworks, retrieval frameworks
• Coding agents, version control

Compensation and benefits

The annual base salary range for this position in Illinois is $127,000 - $171,000. Eligible employees also participate in short-term incentives in addition to salary.

• Medical, Dental, Vision
• Life Insurance
• Short-Term Disability, Long-Term Disability
• 401(k) match
• Flexible Spending Accounts
• EAP
• Education Assistance
• Parental Leave
• Paid time off, Holidays

Location and work environment

Office-based role with some travel and visits to other RWE Americas offices and field locations. The employee must be able to sit, walk, or stand for long durations of time.

• Chicago, IL, US (60654)
• Austin, TX, US (78701)

Eligibility to work

Applicants must be legally authorized to work in the United States. RWE Americas is unable to sponsor or take over sponsorship of employment visas at this time.

Contact HR: [email protected]