AI Engineer - Freelance

This role may sit anywhere as long as the individual is willing to work North America hours.

Realize the unimagined

Fantasy is a digital product and innovation company. We realize the unimagined for the world's most ambitious organizations. Founded in 1999, our global reputation is based on our teams' unique ability to think beyond the ordinary and launch ground-breaking products and services. We believe that our phenomenal team is the core reason for our success, our growth, and our thriving culture.

The Role

As an AI Engineer at Fantasy, your primary responsibility will be to conceptualize, develop, and deploy AI solutions that power features and product enhancements for our clients. Working with cross-functional software engineering teams to integrate AI and machine learning models, algorithms, and data pipelines into infrastructure, your work will not only drive the future of Fantasy, but influence the future of the industry. You'll engage in a mix of research (approximately 35%) and engineering (approximately 65%), while rapidly proving and giving form to novel AI-enabled digital experiences through functional prototyping.

Responsibilities

• Conceptualize, develop, and deploy AI solutions to power features and product enhancements.
• Work as part of software engineering teams to integrate AI and machine learning models, algorithms, and data pipelines into the infrastructure.
• Rapidly prove and give form to novel AI-enabled digital experiences through functional prototyping, with a focus on frequent sharable demo releases for stakeholders.
• Support the design, architecture, and implementation of scalable systems that support AI-powered functionalities, ensuring high performance, reliability, security, and responsible AI.
• Manage AI Ops including model server infrastructures, cloud service quotas, endpoint deployments, model/API uptime and response time.
• Stay abreast of industry trends, advancements, and emerging technologies in AI, agent systems, machine learning, and backend development.
• Conduct project-driven research initiatives, designing appropriate research methodology and acceptance criteria based on specific project needs.
• Define and estimate your accountable tasks and maintain status (e.g., Asana, Jira).
• Test, review, and release code using version control within continuous delivery.
• Document key architecture decision points, reasons, and alternatives explored.
• Work effectively independently and as part of a dispersed team of experts, which can vary from single engineer prototypes to initiatives that extend across time zones and continents.

Experience / Key Personal Qualities

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, AI, Data Science, Machine Learning, Applied Mathematics or a similar field of study, or equivalent work experience.
• 3+ years of experience in software engineering, data science, or machine learning engineering within an experience design or technology agency, enterprise, or a software company.
• Project-proven programming abilities, with a preference for Python and AI SDKs; Node with AI feature-rich implementations will be considered.
• Flexibility with contributing AI components on a multi-language application as part of a larger team or building prototype soup-to-nuts yourself.
• Expert understanding of LLMs including prompt engineering, Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), fine-tuning, and Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) techniques.
• Experience with models, such as LLaMA, Gemini, OpenAI GPT, and open-source models.
• Exposure to foundation language (LLM) and vision, audio, and multi-modal models.
• Experience with AI/LLM frameworks, like LangChain, LlamaIndex, Semantic Kernel, and OpenAI Agents SDK.
• Ability to optimize AI algorithms and models for efficiency, accuracy, and scalability, leveraging best practices and emerging technologies in the field.
• Experience with data exchange formats (JSON, YAML) to ensure structured outputs.
• Strong knowledge of Vector databases; comfort with SQL, NoSQL and/or Graph data.
• Experience with cloud computing systems: Azure, AWS, and or Google Cloud Platform.
• Able to develop synchronous and asynchronous programming structures.
• Strong proficiency with data and ML-adjacent Python libraries (pandas, scikit-learn, etc).
• Passion for AI: You geek out on generative AI, data science and machine learning theory and industry developments.
• Exceptional verbal, written, and presentation skills.
• Ability to work collaboratively in a cross-functional team environment.
• Experience with version control, especially Git.

Additional Desired Qualifications

• Proficient understanding of typical AI tooling ecosystem including knowledge and experience of containerization platforms (e.g., Kubernetes), MLOps and AIOps tools.
• Foundational understanding of machine learning concepts, algorithms, and techniques.
• Experience or knowledge of AI model training techniques.
• Experience with graph data structures and application for AI.
• Strong communication skills; can represent the Fantasy brand with clients or the broader AI community.
• Experience setting up and deploying web applications and managing CI/CD integrations.
• Front end experience a plus.

Fantasy EOE

Fantasy is an Equal Opportunity Employer. Since 1999, diversity has been vital to our success and ability to create products and services used and loved by millions of people all over the world. We are committed to continually fostering a diverse, equitable, and inclusive workplace.