AI Engineer (AJC)

At The Atlanta Journal-Constitution (AJC), our mission is to be the most essential and engaging source of news for the people of Atlanta, Georgia and the South. As we transition from a historic daily newspaper to a dynamic modern media company, we are seeking a talented AI Engineer to join our team. The AJC believes that when you cover the South, you uncover the nation. It's a belief that's produced award-winning journalism, elevated our community, and captured the substance and soul of our hometown.
If you're ready to make headlines with your talent and drive, we want you on our team. Apply now and be a part of the next chapter in the AJC's transformation. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution (AJC) is evolving from a legacy newspaper into a modern digital media company, committed to delivering credible, compelling journalism that informs and engages Atlantans and the broader South.
We're looking for an AI Engineer who can design, build, and ship end-to-end AI solutions-especially LLM-powered personalization and intelligent search/assistant experiences that operate reliably in real time. You'll work across the stack (data, modeling, services, evaluation, and guardrails), collaborate deeply with product and engineering, and help us turn unstructured and structured information into practical, safe, and transparent capabilities for readers and internal teams.
WHAT YOU'LL DO

• Build LLM applications end-to-end: design, prototype, and productionize RAG pipelines, vector search, and agentic workflows that power personalization, content discovery, and on-site assistance.
• Own retrieval & data foundations: create ingestion and chunking pipelines; manage embeddings and vector indexes (e.g., pgvector/Snowflake vectors/Pinecone); implement metadata schemas, recency signals, and hybrid retrieval (BM25 + ANN).
• Engineer reliability & safety: implement guardrails (schema-constrained generation, tool access controls, moderation, grounding checks, citation verification) and fallbacks; design red-team tests and safety playbooks; and prioritize governance & security of proprietary data
• Measure what matters: build offline/online evaluation harnesses (precision/recall, answer quality, hallucination rate, latency, cost); define acceptance criteria and run A/B tests with product partners.
• Ship real-time experiences: stand up low-latency inference services and event-driven pipelines (e.g., Lambda/FastAPI/ECS; queues/streams) with caching layers (Redis/Valkey) and robust observability (traces, logs, drift monitors).
• Support personalization at scale: collaborate on user modeling (content/user embeddings, topic/intent signals), feature stores, and policy/business-rule layering for rankers and bandits.
• Build internal AI tools: deliver secure, enterprise search and analytics copilots that unify docs, data catalogs, tickets, dashboards, and code-unlocking self-service insights across the newsroom and business teams.
• Partner cross-functionally: work with principal architects, software engineers, data scientists, and product managers to scope MVPs, de-risk unknowns, and iterate quickly.
• Contribute to DS/ML delivery: help package, deploy, and operationalize real-time ML models with clear APIs, tests, and CI/CD.
• Champion transparency & governance: document designs and decisions; communicate trade-offs to non-technical stakeholders; uphold privacy, security, and compliance for PII and model usage.

WHO YOU ARE
Required Qualifications

• Applicants must currently be authorized to work in the United States for any employer without current or future sponsorship. No OPT, CPT, STEM/OPT or visa sponsorship now or in future.
• Bachelor's degree plus 6+ years in AI, Data Science/ML, or Software Engineering (or equivalent experience), including shipping production services.
• Must live within a commutable distance to the Midtown Atlanta and work in a hybrid setting.
• Hands-on LLM app experience: prompt engineering, system prompts/tooling, RAG design, agent frameworks, structured outputs and response validation.
• Search & vectors: practical experience with vector databases or vector capabilities (e.g., Snowflake vector functions, pgvector, Pinecone), LangChain and hybrid retrieval techniques.
• Data fluency: strong SQL; comfort joining/curating large text corpora; experience with Snowflake (or similar), and familiarity with orchestration and streaming patterns.
• Backend engineering: build and operate APIs/services (Python preferred); familiarity with serverless or containerized deployments (AWS Lambda, ECS/Fargate, FastAPI).
• Real-time systems: understanding of low-latency inference, caching, rate-limiting, and cost controls; experience instrumenting services for performance and reliability.
• Integrating solutions: experience in integrating AI/ML into existing applications in batch and real-time.
• Evaluation & experimentation: ability to design eval sets, define quality metrics, and run A/B tests; experience reducing hallucinations and enforcing guardrails.
• Guardrails & ethics mindset: knowledge of safety layers, data governance, prompt leakage risks, and secure tool use-balancing capability with responsibility.
• Version Control: Experience with GitHub + CI/CD
• Collaboration & communication: clear, concise explainer of complex topics; able to connect technical decisions to business outcomes and user value.

Why It Matters
To grow our mission and our audience, we need to deliver experiences that feel tailored, helpful, and trustworthy-both to readers and to our internal teams. You'll be a key builder of those capabilities, turning cutting-edge AI into safe, transparent, and real-time products that deepen engagement, strengthen our subscriber value proposition, and amplify the impact of AJC journalism.
USD 111,500.00 - 185,900.00 per year
Compensation:
Compensation includes a base salary of $111,500.00 - $185,900.00. The base salary may vary within the anticipated base pay range based on factors such as the ultimate location of the position and the selected candidate's knowledge, skills, and abilities. Position may be eligible for additional compensation that may include an incentive program.
Benefits:
The Company offers eligible employees the flexibility to take as much vacation with pay as they deem consistent with their duties, the company's needs, and its obligations; seven paid holidays throughout the calendar year; and up to 160 hours of paid wellness annually for their own wellness or that of family members. Employees are also eligible for additional paid time off in the form of bereavement leave, time off to vote, jury duty leave, volunteer time off, military leave, and parental leave.