[Remote] Forward Deployed AI Engineer (B2B Contract)

Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Toloka AI is hiring a Forward Deployed AI Engineer to partner with client technical leaders and solve complex AI data challenges. The role designs and delivers data-generation, labeling, and evaluation solutions and pipelines, while providing technical leadership across engagements and owning delivery and commercial outcomes.

Responsibilities

• Act as the primary technical counterpart to CTOs, VPs of Engineering, and research/engineering leadership
• Lead executive conversations using a structured, answer-first (BLUF) approach
• Manage escalations and expectations with composure and integrity
• Build long-term trusted relationships by recommending evidence-based solutions
• Ask excellent questions to uncover the client's real need - the "question behind the question." Understand their model, which metrics they want to move, and how they intend to train or evaluate it
• Draw on a solid understanding of how LLMs are trained and fine-tuned to have credible conversations with their technical leaders, understand their data strategy, and proactively propose the data that will solve their problem - with options and rationale ("based on your goal, you likely need this, or this")
• Design and build the data solutions yourself: configure data-labeling components and quality controls, develop user interfaces and AI-driven solutions (e.g. agentic systems, RAG, synthetic data generation), and integrate them into automated, multi-stage pipelines that produce data for AI training and evaluation
• Architect and reason about complex, multi-stage solutions end to end; run experiments to prove the pipeline delivers data of the required quality and speed; iterate from MVP toward production
• Provide technical leadership across multiple client engagements, establish reusable engineering standards and best practices, and mentor Solution Engineers and Technical Consultants to raise the overall technical bar of the organization
• Own delivery end to end - timelines, quality, and scalability - and the commercial outcome: Gross Margin and Contribution Margin, with the levers, trade-offs, and next checkpoints named, not just described
• Identify and drive expansion opportunities

Skills

• You can confidently lead conversations with CTOs, VPs, and senior technical stakeholders - clear, concise, structured, persuasive, and calm under pressure
• Professional English (C1+) is essential
• You understand how modern LLMs are trained, fine-tuned, and evaluated (including SFT, RLHF/RLAIF, DPO/PPO, reward modeling, and LoRA/PEFT)
• You're comfortable discussing these topics with senior technical stakeholders and translating their goals into effective AI data solutions
• You've designed complex AI solutions, built multi-stage pipelines, and developed AI-driven systems (e.g. agentic workflows, RAG, or synthetic data generation)
• You're comfortable working in Python (NumPy, Pandas), integrating APIs, and independently prototyping LLM-powered solutions
• You understand version control, testing, MVP thinking, and iterative development
• You enjoy working through ambiguity, asking the right questions, and translating business or research goals into clear AI data and evaluation strategies
• 8+ years delivering complex AI, ML, or data projects end to end, with experience influencing technical direction beyond individual projects
• You take responsibility for outcomes, make thoughtful trade-offs between time, cost, and quality, and are comfortable owning both technical and commercial success
• Experience building production software is a strong plus
• Experience establishing engineering standards, mentoring engineers, or leading cross-functional technical initiatives is highly valued
• Experience in top-tier strategy consulting (McKinsey, Bain, BCG) and/or as an applied ML / LLM engineer is a strong advantage
• Hands-on experience training or fine-tuning LLMs and/or building agentic systems (helps you reason about client needs - though the role itself is about building data solutions, not training models)
• Advanced degree (MSc/PhD) in AI, CS, or a related field
• Experience in crowdsourcing and/or data-centric AI, and with fast-paced, multi-project delivery for frontier AI clients

Benefits

• Freelance (B2B) collaboration, with a path into a project team if things go well
• Flexible, fully remote schedule (40 hours per week)
• Work at the leading edge of AI development, alongside a dedicated and dynamic team of experts
• Projects with customers that are AI industry leaders and well-known household names
• Friendly community

Company Overview