Sr. AI/ML Engineer

Nuveen, the investment manager of TIAA, offers a comprehensive range of outcome-focused investment solutions designed to secure the long-term financial goals of institutional and individual investors. Its affiliates offer deep expertise across a comprehensive range of traditional and alternative investments through a wide array of vehicles and customized strategies. For more information about the firm please visit our website at www.Nuveen.com. Nuveen is a global investment manager that works in partnership with our clients to create outcome-focused solutions to help them reach their goals for their financial future.
 
The senior AI/ML Engineer is a key technical leader and major contributor to a high-performing, fast-paced engineering team responsible for designing, building, and deploying enterprise-grade generative AI solutions. This role requires deep expertise in distributed systems, scalable architecture, and cutting-edge AI/ML technologies, with a focus on delivering production-ready applications on AWS using Python.

As a hands-on technical leader, you will be involved in the full software development lifecycle (SDLC), from requirements gathering and architecture design through implementation, deployment, and ongoing optimization. You will design robust, low-latency AI applications, implement best practices in DevOps and MLOps, and ensure all solutions meet enterprise standards for security, governance, and compliance.

Key Responsibilities and Duties

• Design and implement generative AI solutions using comprehensive pipelines. Build end-to-end systems integrating structured and unstructured data stores, graph databases, indexing strategies, and reinforced learning strategies, embedding models, and LLMs to enable context-aware, knowledge-grounded responses. Build production-grade AI agents using both low-code platforms and high-code custom implementations and optimize for performance and maintainability.

• Design, train, and deploy end-to-end machine learning pipelines encompassing data ingestion, feature engineering, model selection, hyperparameter tuning, and validation using frameworks such as scikit-learn, XGBoost, PyTorch, and TensorFlow.

• Apply advanced statistical modeling, exploratory data analysis, and feature store design to extract actionable insights from large, complex, and heterogeneous datasets. Build and maintain robust data preprocessing and transformation workflows to handle class imbalance, missing data, and distribution drift, and implement model monitoring pipelines to detect and respond to concept drift, data quality degradation, and performance regression in production environments, ensuring sustained model reliability and business relevance over time.

• Architect and develop large-scale, cloud-native (AWS) Python applications using modern frameworks, optimized for high performance, low latency, and horizontal scalability. Implement Infrastructure as Code (IaC) using Terraform for version-controlled, reproducible infrastructure provisioning. Implement robust testing strategies including unit tests, integration tests, end-to-end tests, performance tests, and AI-specific testing (prompt regression tests, model output validation).

• Apply security best practices including IAM, least-privilege access, role-based access control (RBAC), and multi-factor authentication; enforce encryption at rest and in transit; and ensure secure key management and data masking/tokenization for sensitive information.

• Design and manage containerized applications using Docker for packaging and Kubernetes (EKS) or ECS for orchestration, ensuring efficient resource utilization and auto-scaling.

• Establish and enforce CI/CD best practices using GitHub Actions, Jenkins, GitLab CI, or AWS CodePipeline to automate build, test, and deployment processes.

• Maintain comprehensive documentation of system architectures, data flows, security controls, and operational procedures to support compliance audits and knowledge transfer.

Educational Requirements

• University (Degree) Preferred

Work Experience

• 5+ Years Required; 7+ Years Preferred

Physical Requirements

• Physical Requirements: Sedentary Work

Career Level
8IC

Required Skills:

• 5+ years of software engineering experience with demonstrated progression in technical leadership and system design
• 3+ years of hands-on experience with AI/ML, with at least 1+ year focused on Generative AI, LLMs, and production deployment
• Extensive AWS experience with hands-on implementation of compute, storage, networking, security, and AI/ML services.
• Expert-level Python programming with deep knowledge of advanced language features, design patterns, and performance optimization.
• Full-stack development skills including backend API development with RESTful design principles, frontend development
• Production experience with Generative AI technologies: LLM APIs, RAG frameworks and vector databases, Prompt engineering and optimization techniques, AI agent frameworks, Model fine-tuning and evaluation
• Experience in building CI/CD pipelines using Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, CloudFormation), Container orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes/EKS), Monitoring and observability tools
• Understanding of distributed systems, microservices architecture, event-driven design, and scalability patterns

Preferred Skills:

• Experience with additional cloud platforms (Azure, GCP) and multi-cloud architectures
• Contributions to open-source AI/ML projects or published research
• Knowledge of additional programming languages (C++, Go, Rust)
• Experience with real-time streaming and event-driven architecture
• Familiarity with advanced AI techniques (multimodal models, vision transformers, diffusion models)

Anticipated Posting End Date:

Actual base salary may vary based upon, but not limited to, relevant experience, time in role, base salary of internal peers, prior performance, business sector, and geographic location.  In addition to base salary, the competitive compensation package may include, depending on the role, participation in an incentive program linked to performance (for example, annual discretionary incentive programs, non-annual sales incentive plans, or other non-annual incentive plans). 

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Company Overview

Nuveen is a global investment leader, managing public and private assets for clients around the world and on behalf of TIAA, our parent company and one of the world’s largest institutional investors. We invest in the growth of businesses, real estate, infrastructure and natural capital, providing clients with the reliability, access and foresight unique to our heritage. Our prevailing perspective on the future drives our ambition to innovate and adapt our business to the changing needs of investors - all to pursue lasting performance for our clients, our communities and our global economy. Visit www.nuveen.com to learn more about us.

Our Culture of Impact

At TIAA, we're on a mission to build on our 100+ year legacy of delivering for our clients while evolving to meet tomorrow's challenges. We equip our associates with future-focused skills and AI tools that enable us to advance our mission. Together, we are fighting to ensure a more secure financial future for all and for generations to come. We are guided by our values: Champion Our People, Be Client Obsessed, Lead with Integrity, Own It, and Win As One. They influence every decision we make and how we work together to serve our clients every day. We thrive in a collaborative in-office environment where teams work across organizational boundaries with shared purpose, accelerating innovation and delivering meaningful results. Our workplace brings together TIAA and Nuveen's entrepreneurial spirit, where we work hard and work together to create lasting impact. Here, every associate can grow through meaningful learning experiences and development pathways—because when our people succeed, our impact on clients' lives grows stronger.

Benefits and Total Rewards

The organization is committed to making financial well-being possible for its clients, and is equally committed to the well-being of our associates. That’s why we offer a comprehensive Total Rewards package designed to make a positive difference in the lives of our associates and their loved ones. Our benefits include a superior retirement program and highly competitive health, wellness and work life offerings that can help you achieve and maintain your best possible physical, emotional and financial well-being. To learn more about your benefits, please review our Benefits Summary.

Equal Opportunity

We are an Equal Opportunity Employer. TIAA does not discriminate against any candidate or employee on the basis of age, race, color, national origin, sex, religion, veteran status, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity, or any other legally protected status.

Our full EEO & Non-Discrimination statement is on our careers home page, and you can read more about your rights and view government notices here.

Accessibility Support

TIAA offers support for those who need assistance with our online application process to provide an equal employment opportunity to all job seekers, including individuals with disabilities. 

If you are a U.S. applicant and desire a reasonable accommodation to complete a job application please use one of the below options to contact our accessibility support team: 

Phone: (800) 842-2755

Email: [email protected]

Drug and Smoking Policy

TIAA maintains a drug-free and smoke/free workplace.

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