Senior AI Engineer

Solutions for Today’s Challenges. Vision for Tomorrow’s Opportunities.

Join William Blair, the Premier Global Boutique.

William Blair has delivered trusted advice for nearly nine decades, and we continue to deepen our expertise and relationships across regions, asset classes, and markets throughout North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia.

We are committed to our people and culture, values, clients, and local communities.

What sets us apart is that we are an independent partnership, with employees who have unique experiences, perspectives, and backgrounds. We provide advisory services, strategies, and solutions to meet clients’ evolving needs amid dynamic market conditions and varying industries.

We strive to attract the most qualified, passionate candidates who specialize in investment banking, investment management, private wealth management, and a variety of other business functions.

We work tirelessly to create an inclusive culture and take pride in fostering employees’ professional and personal growth. We empower our people to bring their best thinking each day so we can deliver the tailored, thoughtful work and problem-solving abilities that our clients expect.

Equally, we are proud of our long-term partnerships with the communities in which we live and work, a legacy we inherited from our founder.

We invite you to learn about how we are seeking excellence in everything we do and empowering our clients’ success with passion, creativity, and rigor. For more information, visit williamblair.com.

You will be joining a high-performing and motivated Business & Technology team that works alongside Portfolio Managers, Analysts, Quantitative Strategists, and other members of the Institutional Investment Management division. You will also have direct exposure with a dedicated team of technologists with a variety of skill-sets developing & managing our proprietary front-office research platforms. The job will afford the opportunity to work within the business and interact closely with business partners to gain insight into our proprietary research, analytics & portfolio management processes that largely represent our competitive advantage.

JOB SUMMARY & RESPONSIBILITIES:

The Senior AI Engineer will work on building end to end AI solutions leveraging proprietary and 3rd party data sources that drive business growth and achieve productivity gains. Ideal candidates love breaking down problems, building solutions, delivering actionable and data-driven insights, and working in a fast-paced, dynamic environment.

Responsibilities include but may not be limited to:

• Execute and complete AI initiatives and projects. Balance internal development with vendor solutions.
• Develop and deploy robust data architectures (data lake, data warehouse, etc.) to handle large-scale datasets, ensuring data quality and integrity.
• Develop and implement Microservices architecture to facilitate the scalable and efficient management of our data services.
• Leverage and refine open-source generative AI models and use existing generative AI models to solve advanced data augmentation and analytics.
• Manage and optimize data processing workflows, ensuring timely and accurate data availability.
• Optimize data retrieval processes through database tuning, query optimization, and ensuring scalable infrastructures.
• Analyze structured and unstructured data to understand how our customers interact with our product and service offerings
• Perform the design, analysis, and interpretation of projects from data requirement gathering to data processing, modeling, and recommendations
• Work with engineers, analysts, and business teams to understand data requirements and deliver scalable data solutions.
• Collaborate with IT, security, and compliance teams to ensure adherence to data management and protection standards.
• Manage and optimize cloud-based data solutions (preferably Azure: including Synapse, Azure Machine Learning, Databricks, ADF, and Azure Data Lake).
• Ensure robustness, scalability, and sustainability of data infrastructure in the cloud environment.
• Maintain comprehensive documentation of data models, pipelines, and ETL processes.

QUALIFICATIONS:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Data Science, or a related field. Master's degree preferred.
• 5+ years of experience as a data engineer or machine learning engineer, with a proven track record in developing ETL processes, data pipeline architecture, and machine learning model development.
• Highly proficient in Python, with strong problem-solving skills demonstrated through experience in data processing, manipulation, and algorithmic challenges. Skilled in applying efficient algorithms and optimizing code to handle complex data tasks. Hands-on experience with API utilization, development, and management.
• Proficient in working with LLMs, with extensive experience in prompt engineering, including designing, refining, and optimizing prompts to achieve highly accurate and contextually relevant responses from AI systems. Skilled in leveraging advanced techniques to fine-tune outputs, ensuring models deliver targeted results across diverse use cases.
• Experienced in working with a wide range of machine learning and deep learning algorithms, along with various frameworks. Skilled in implementing, fine-tuning, and optimizing models using popular tools such as TensorFlow, PyTorch, and scikit-learn to address complex
• Demonstrable expertise in designing and implementing efficient data models to support ETL processes and data analytics.
• Extensive experience managing and optimizing Azure cloud data technologies (Synapse, Databricks, ADF, or Azure Data Lake).
• Practical experience with event-driven architecture and real-time data processing.
• Ability to effectively communicate technical concepts to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Self-starter, comfortable with ambiguity, ability to initiate and drive projects
• K8s and Docker Experience with SQL and Spark to handle data extraction, transformation, and loading of big data.
• A record of continuous learning and adaptation to stay updated with the latest in data engineering, machine learning, generative AI, cloud technologies, and data compliance standards.
• Certifications in Azure Data Engineering, Azure Machine Learning, Spark, or other relevant technologies.
• Proven track record of leveraging data to deliver business value and present data-driven insights to business audiences.
• Experience shipping code into production.

#LI-CH1

William Blair is an equal opportunity employer. It complies with all laws and regulations that prohibit discrimination in employment practice because of race, color, religion, creed, ancestry, marital status, gender, age, national origin, sexual orientation, unfavorable discharge from the military service or on the basis of a physical or mental disability that is unrelated to the employee's ability to perform the duties of the job applied for. EOE m/f/d/v

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Note to External Recruiters / Search Firms: William Blair does not accept unsolicited resumes and will not pay for any placement resulting from the receipt of an unsolicited resume. Any unsolicited resumes received will not be considered as a valid submission.

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