Analyst or Associate, AI Engineer

About DESRI

DESRI (formerly D. E. Shaw Renewable Investments) is a market-leading owner and operator of renewable energy projects throughout the United States. We have acquired or developed approximately 13 gigawatts of contracted capacity across a portfolio of over 85 renewable energy projects in 24 states.

At DESRI, our culture is grounded in rigorous analytics and thoughtful risk-taking, with a strong emphasis on creativity, intellectual curiosity, and continuous improvement. We operate with lean teams that prioritize efficiency and minimize unnecessary bureaucracy, enabling individuals to take ownership and move quickly. We value open, constructive dialogue and believe it leads to better outcomes. Above all, we are driven to go the extra mile and support one another, fostering a collaborative environment built on accountability, integrity, and care.

About the role

DESRI is seeking a talented and highly motivated individual to join its team as an Analyst or Associate, AI Engineer (title commensurate with experience). This is a hands-on engineering role focused on applying AI across DESRI’s renewable energy business. The position is based in DESRI’s New York office.

The AI Engineer works closely with commercial and technical teams to identify high-value problems and build the tools that solve them.

This is an ownership role. The AI Engineer takes applications from zero to one — scoping with stakeholders, resolving data issues, building the front end and back end, deploying to production, and driving adoption. Expect to hold three to four projects at once and to keep live applications healthy while building new ones.

Data science and machine learning experience is highly valued. Forecasting, predictive modeling, and quantitative modeling will be a significant part of the role, alongside core AI engineering. Our users are accustomed to best-in-class commercial AI tools, and internal applications are held to the same standard of quality and reliability.

What you'll do

• Design, build, and deploy AI applications from prototype through production for commercial and technical teams across the business
• Work closely with a business team, learn its workflow in depth, and exercise judgment on what to build, what to defer, and what is better solved with existing tools than with new code
• Drive adoption of each tool through change management, training, documentation, and iteration until it is part of the team’s daily work
• Clean, structure, and manage data across databases, data warehouses, and internal systems, and integrate with vendor platforms and APIs
• Build and maintain data pipelines and deployment infrastructure on Azure, including databases, storage, and application hosting
• Build and maintain rigorous testing and evaluation for every application, and diagnose where multi-step workflows fail
• Design prompts, tools, and retrieval so that language-model applications produce accurate and reliable results
• Build well-controlled, reliable automated workflows, starting with rule-based logic and moving to models as the data supports it
• Develop forecasting and predictive models, favoring approaches whose results can be explained to the business
• Help teams document institutional knowledge so it can be reused across the business
• Contribute to build-versus-buy decisions and to the evaluation of new AI tools
• This is not a data engineering, IT, or enterprise platform administration role

Qualifications

• Undergraduate or graduate degree in computer science, engineering, data science, statistics, mathematics, economics, or a related quantitative field.
• Two or more years of software development experience, including experience building an AI-enabled application from prototype through production.
• Experience deploying a machine learning model to production, including the data cleaning and pipeline work surrounding it.
• Experience owning a product across both front end and back end; this is a full-stack role.
• Strong proficiency in Python and SQL, and hands-on experience building with large language models, including model APIs, retrieval, and evaluation.
• Experience with cloud platforms, preferably Azure, including databases, data warehouses, data pipelines, and production deployment.
• Strong commercial judgment, including the ability to learn an unfamiliar domain quickly, engage credibly with business stakeholders, and prioritize by business value.
• Experience and commercial context in renewable energy, utilities, energy markets, or EPC construction is highly preferred.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, and comfort driving change with non-technical users.
• Comfort with ambiguity, shifting priorities, and a fast pace.
• At DESRI, we consider a wide range of factors to determine your compensation. We rely on market indicators and consider your specific job family, background, location, skills, and experience. The expected annual base salary for this position is $100,000 to $130,000 (depending on title and experience).

• Our compensation and benefits package includes variable compensation in the form of a year-end bonus, guaranteed in the first year of hire, and benefits including medical and prescription drug coverage, 401(k) contribution matching, paid time off, wellness reimbursement, family building benefits, and a charitable gift match program.