{"id":1294493,"url":"https://alion.io/job/sparq-principal-ai-engineer","title":"Principal AI Engineer","company":{"id":2107477,"name":"Sparq","domain":"teamsparq.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/teamsparq","size_band":null,"is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Rippling","truth_index":{"grade":"B","score":75,"open_postings":7,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":1,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":null,"computed_at":"2026-10-13T05:45:00Z"}},"role":"AI/ML","role_family":"AI/ML","seniority":"lead","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"explicit","locations":["United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":{"min_usd":147000,"max_usd":302000,"period":"year","method":"role_seniority_country_remote_cell","sample_n":640},"experience_years_min":8,"visa_sponsorship":true,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"Agentic Workflows","optional":false},{"name":"Anthropic","optional":false},{"name":"AWS","optional":false},{"name":"Azure","optional":false},{"name":"CI/CD","optional":false},{"name":"Claude","optional":false},{"name":"Context Engineering","optional":false},{"name":"Fine-tuning","optional":false},{"name":"Function Calling","optional":false},{"name":"GCP","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"RAG","optional":false},{"name":"Tool Use","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2025-06-03T21:09:52Z","employer_posted_date":"2025-06-03","last_verified_at":"2026-10-13T19:23:34Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":496,"trust":{"level":"stale","repost_count":0,"flags":["stale"],"days_open":496},"description":"At Sparq, we help companies solve the right problems-not just build more technology.\nWe’re a modern product engineering partner blending strategy, craftsmanship, and speed to help organizations modernize confidently in the age of AI. From data ecosystems to digital products and AI acceleration, we turn complexity into clarity and ideas into impact.\nIf you’re driven to build what’s next, lead with empathy, and deliver excellence without ego, you’ll feel right at home at Sparq.\nC2C is not available\nMust be authorized to work in the U.S. without sponsorship\nWhy you will enjoy Mondays again:\nOpportunity to work alongside a talented, diverse team in a collaborative and creative environment\nOngoing investment in your growth through training, mentorship, and industry certifications\nHands-on exposure to cutting-edge technologies across multiple industries\nRecognition programs and employee awards within an inclusive culture that celebrates great work, including our AI Innovators Program\nRemote or hybrid work options\nCompetitive salary \nRobust benefits package, matching 401(k) plan, and substantial PTO\nTuition reimbursement\nA Day in the Life:\nDesign and build production AI systems for client environments, including retrieval-augmented generation pipelines, agentic workflows, and model integration, applying fine-tuning where it is genuinely warranted.\nImplement and deploy AI solutions on cloud platforms, ensuring scalability, reliability, and performance.\nUse Python for data preprocessing, model development, and automation of AI workflows.\nDefine and build evaluation frameworks so we can prove solution quality to clients rather than demonstrate it anecdotally.\nServe as the senior technical voice in client conversations, from discovery through delivery, and mentor engineers across accounts.\nCollaborate with the development team to broaden AI capabilities and enhance existing solutions.\nResearch and experiment with emerging AI technologies, staying ahead of industry advancements and bringing practical recommendations back to the team.\nOptimize and monitor AI systems post-deployment, ensuring efficiency, accuracy, cost control, and reliability.\nActively use AI tools, including Claude through our Anthropic partnership, to streamline tasks, improve the quality of your work, and share best practices with teammates while continuously seeking new ways to integrate AI into your everyday workflows\nWhat it takes:\nExperience: 8+ years building and shipping production software or data systems, with 3+ years specifically delivering AI/ML or generative AI solutions that reached real users. Consulting or client-services experience is a strong plus.\nHands-on AI/ML: Demonstrated experience building production systems with large language models, including retrieval-augmented generation, agentic workflows and tool use, prompt and context engineering, and the judgment to know when fine-tuning is and is not the right call. Experience with classical ML and the full model lifecycle is valued.\nEngineering: Strong Python. Experience with modern AI frameworks and orchestration tooling, vector databases and embedding pipelines, and API design for AI-backed services. Comfortable with version control, testing, and CI/CD.\nCloud & MLOps: Production experience on AWS, Azure, or GCP, including their AI/ML services. Familiarity with containerization, infrastructure as code, and deploying and monitoring models at scale.\nEvaluation & Quality: Experience designing evaluation frameworks for nondeterministic systems. Able to define accuracy, latency, and cost targets and prove a system meets them both before and after it ships.\nResponsible AI & Security: Working knowledge of data privacy and PII handling, model risk and bias, prompt injection and other AI-specific attack surfaces, and how to satisfy client compliance requirements.\nCost & Performance: Practical judgment on model selection, inference cost, and latency tradeoffs, including recognizing when a smaller model or a non-AI solution is the right answer.\nClient-Facing Skills: Able to run technical discovery with client stakeholders, translate business problems into AI solution designs, and explain tradeoffs credibly to both engineers and executives. Comfortable supporting pre-sales and solutioning conversations.\nLeadership: Experience mentoring engineers and raising AI capability across a team, including geographically distributed teams. Experience building reusable accelerators or internal assets is a plus.\nAdaptability: Self-motivated, flexible, and reliable in delivering on time, with the ability to work in a fast-paced, highly entrepreneurial environment.\nRegardless of your specific role, we seek individuals who are excited to explore, adopt, and evangelize AI tools and methodologies. If you have experience in AI or a proven track record of rapidly learning and mentoring others on emerging tech, you’ll fit right in.\nEqual Employment Opportunity Policy: Sparq is proud to offer equal employment opportunity without regard to age, color, disability, gender, gender identity, genetic information, marital status, military status, national origin, race, religion, sexual orientation, veteran status, or any other legally protected characteristic.\nWe are committed to providing equal employment opportunities and believe in an inclusive workplace. 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