Lead AI Engineer
Merkle · Posted Oct 8
Data-driven customer experience management, marketing, and digital transformation services
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About the role
Merkle, dentsu's customer experience and data business, is building intelligent agents, multimodal experiences, personalization systems, and knowledge-grounded AI solutions that power customer engagement for global brands. The team works across deep learning, transformer architectures, retrieval systems, agentic frameworks, and production-grade ML deployment on cloud infrastructure. This Lead Generative AI Engineer role partners with engineering, data science, and CX teams to build GenAI applications, fine-tuned and multimodal models, and scalable AI APIs and microservices, while mentoring junior engineers.
What you will do
- Build conversational and non-conversational, multimodal, and agentic AI applications using LLMs and frameworks such as LangChain, LangGraph, LlamaIndex, AutoGen, or similar.
- Design AI workflows incorporating reasoning, planning, tool-use, memory, grounding, and external system integrations.
- Develop Knowledge Graph (KG)-assisted AI systems, including entity extraction, linking, and KG-augmented retrieval.
- Ensure safety, consistency, and hallucination-control through structured evaluation and guardrails.
- Transform models into scalable APIs and microservices using Python, FastAPI/Flask, Docker.
- Deploy and monitor ML/AI systems in AWS/Azure/GCP, optimizing for cost, latency, and reliability.
- Collaborate with MLOps teams on CI/CD pipelines, model versioning, monitoring, and automated evaluation.
- Work with big data technologies including Apache Spark, Hadoop, and NoSQL databases such as MongoDB.
- Build and optimize transformer-based and multimodal models using deep learning frameworks (e.g., PyTorch, TensorFlow).
- Implement fine-tuning, alignment (RLHF/RLAIF), LoRA/QLoRA, pruning, and model evaluation pipelines.
- Develop information retrieval systems, including hybrid dense–sparse retrieval, ranking, knowledge graphs, and relevance optimization.
- Build predictive models and ML pipelines from scratch, including data preparation, feature engineering, and model selection.
- Work cross-functionally with CX, engineering, and product stakeholders to translate business needs into AI solutions.
- Document models, experiments, evaluation frameworks, and deployment processes.
- Mentor junior engineers and contribute to internal best practices, reusable components, and R&D initiatives.
Skills used in this role
What the employer is looking for
- Minimum 5+ years of hands-on software development experience including building and deploying machine learning models into production.
- 2+ years of experience working with deep learning, GenAI, or transformer-based architectures.
- Demonstrated experience building GenAI applications beyond simple RAG (e.g., agents, multimodal, custom LLM fine-tuning).
- Experience integrating AI systems in enterprise-grade environments.
- Programming: Python (advanced), SQL; robust experience with API development and data engineering,
- Backend Frameworks: Flask, FASTAPI, Django
- Machine Learning: Predictive modelling, deep learning, optimization, embeddings, vector search, model evaluation.
- Generative AI: LLMs, RAG, multimodal architectures, agents, prompt engineering, grounding, knowledge graphs.
- Cloud Platforms: AWS, Azure, or GCP with hands-on experience deploying and scaling AI systems.
- Data Technologies: Apache Spark, Hadoop, MongoDB; strong understanding of data pipelines and large-scale processing.
- Math Foundations: Linear algebra, probability, statistics.
Benefits and support
- Compensation and benefits are detailed in the job posting
About Merkle
Merkle is a data-driven, technology-enabled customer experience management (CXM) company and part of the dentsu network. It specializes in delivering unique, personalized customer experiences across platforms and devices by leveraging deep capabilities in data science, analytics, and CRM. The company operates globally, helping enterprise brands drive business growth and long-term customer loyalty.
- Industry
- Digital Marketing
- Company size
- 10001+ employees
- Founded
- 1988
- Location
- Columbia, Maryland, USA
- Funding stage
- Acquired
Funding
Acquired
Leadership
Global President
Chairman / Former CEO
Chief Technology Officer, Americas
Chief Operating Officer, Americas
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