AI/ML Engineer

AI/ML Engineer

About Us:

At Near, we help top talent in Latin America find remote roles with US companies. Our mission is to create better lives by fostering a remote work culture that transcends borders.

About Our Client:

Our client is a private equity firm building a small, highly technical AI team focused on identifying, building, and scaling high-impact AI solutions across its portfolio companies.

About the Role:

Join our US client on their mission to bring high-impact AI solutions to life across their portfolio companies. We are looking for an AI/ML Engineer to work alongside an AI Product Manager, taking opportunities from discovery and technical validation through production deployment and handoff.

This is not a traditional software engineering role with AI added on, and it is not a pure data science or research role. The ideal candidate combines applied ML depth, modern GenAI and agentic experience, strong production engineering skills, and excellent communication.

Note: This is a remote, contractor role.

Key Responsibilities:

• Design and build production-grade AI and ML applications using real enterprise data and systems.

• Build agentic systems, RAG and retrieval pipelines, tool-using workflows, and integrations with enterprise applications and APIs.

• Apply practical ML techniques such as classification, regression, clustering, embeddings, semantic search, ranking, and re-ranking where appropriate.

• Establish evaluation and observability standards, including test datasets, automated evals, tracing, quality scoring, latency and cost monitoring, and regression testing.

• Make pragmatic architecture decisions across models, data, cloud platforms, security, cost, latency, and maintainability.

• Rapidly move from prototype to production while applying sound MLOps/LLMOps, CI/CD, testing, deployment, and monitoring practices.

• Work directly with executives, technical teams, and end users, then document and transfer solutions to portfolio company teams.

What We're Looking For:

• Hands-on experience shipping AI or ML systems into production, including GenAI or agentic applications.

• Daily experience with AI-native development tools such as Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, GitHub Copilot, or comparable tools.

• Applied machine learning foundation beyond simply integrating an LLM API, such as classifiers, embeddings, ranking, model evaluation, feature/data pipelines, deployment, monitoring, or fine-tuning.

• Strong Python, API/backend development, SQL, Docker, automated testing, and production software engineering skills.

• Experience with modern AI patterns and frameworks such as RAG, vector/hybrid search, tool calling, structured outputs, MCP, LangGraph, LangChain, LlamaIndex, or Semantic Kernel.

• Experience with at least one major cloud or data ecosystem such as Azure AI Foundry, AWS Bedrock, Vertex AI, Databricks, Snowflake, or vector databases.

• Ability to take an ambiguous opportunity from discovery to architecture, prototype, production, and handoff.

• Strong professional English communication and the ability to explain technical tradeoffs to both executives and technical teams.

Perks – What's in It for You?

• Compensation in USD: $5,000 - $7,000 per month. Please note that the final salary offer may vary based on the candidate’s seniority, specific skill set, and performance throughout the evaluation and interview process.

• 3 weeks of PTO.

• Local or US holidays.

• Excellent and dynamic work environment.

• Career development opportunities.