Senior AI/ML & Data Engineer
First seen by Alion on Aug 5, 2026.
AI Developer & Data Engineer Financial Advisory AI Platform
Job Title: Senior AI/ML Engineer
We are seeking a senior AI Developer and Data Engineer to design, build, and operationalise an Azure OpenAI-powered financial advisory platform serving 15 AI use cases. You will own both the LLM engineering stack and the financial data layer that makes the AI system accurate, explainable, and safe for direct consumer use in a regulated banking environment.
Key Responsibilities:
Azure OpenAI Framework & LLM Engineering:
- Design and implement the end-to-end Azure OpenAI deployment architecture.
- Build the Business Logic + Prompt Builder layer: prompt templates, chain-of-thought patterns, and system prompt configurations.
- Implement RAG pipelines using Azure AI Search and vector stores to ground financial advice in live user transaction data.
- Design and implement the Validation Layer (Guardrails): out-of-scope detection, hallucination filtering, and Retry/Reject logic.
- Configure Azure OpenAI Content Filters and custom blocklists aligned to PCI DSS 4.0, GDPR, and banking AI governance requirements.
- Implement human-in-the-loop controls for high-impact use cases and confidence scoring.
Data Engineering & Analytics:
- Design and build real-time and batch pipelines ingesting transaction data from Oracle DB on Azure, Azure Event Hub, and Kafka-on-AKS.
- Engineer financial features per use case: rolling spend aggregations, time-series features for balance forecasting, and anomaly detection signals.
- Build and maintain the RAG knowledge base: curate, chunk, embed, and index financial product data.
- Implement PII masking, column-level encryption, and full data lineage.
- Build AI performance analytics: response accuracy dashboards, model input drift detection, and bias monitoring.
Security, Compliance & Governance:
- Enforce no-public-internet AOAI access Private Endpoint, VNet integration, NSG rules, DNS private zones.
- Implement audit logging for all AI interactions to Azure Log Analytics with PII masking.
- Own HIGH-priority AI Risk Assessment remediation.
- Maintain Azure ML model registry, model versioning, and deployment approval pipeline.
Tech Stack:
Azure OpenAI, Prompt Engineering, RAG/Vector Search, LangChain, Semantic Kernel, Azure AI Search, Python, PySpark, Azure Databricks, Apache Kafka, Azure Event Hubs, Oracle DB, Redis, Azure Data Factory, Delta Lake, Azure Kubernetes Service, CI/CD (Azure DevOps), PCI DSS, GDPR.
Requirements:
- 5+ years of experience in AI/software development, with at least 4 years building and shipping production LLM or generative AI applications.
- Deep hands-on experience with Azure OpenAI Service.
- Strong data engineering background: real-time streaming, financial-scale batch pipelines, and SQL/PySpark.
- Experience deploying AI and data workloads on AKS with enterprise security controls.
- Proven track record implementing guardrails and compliance controls in regulated environments.
- Experience with MLOps: model versioning, performance monitoring, and CI/CD pipelines.
- Strong understanding of PCI DSS 4.0, GDPR, and banking AI governance.
- Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Data Science, Software Engineering, or equivalent experience.
Skills
Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Data Engineering, SQL, LLM, OpenAI, Prompt Engineering, RAG, Azure, PySpark, MLOps