Freelance Forward Deployed AI Engineer
- Role
- AI / ML
- Experience
- Senior
- Employment
- Contract
- Company size
- Startup
Open to US only. Set where you work from to check your eligibility.
No BS summary
Senior client-facing AI engineer (8+ лет) для работы с CTO и VP of Engineering ведущих AI-компаний. Нужны hands-on навыки Python (NumPy, Pandas), глубокое понимание LLM (SFT, RLHF, RAG) и опыт построения пайплайнов данных для обучения ИИ. Требуется профессиональный английский C1+.
Core skills
Required skills
Optional skills
Required languages
What you'll do
- 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.
- 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.
What they require
- Executive communication. 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.
- Strong understanding of modern LLM development. You understand how modern LLMs are trained, fine-tuned, and evaluated (including SFT, RLHF/RLAIF, DPO/PPO, reward modeling, and LoRA/PEFT).
- Hands-on solution engineering. You've designed complex AI solutions, built multi-stage pipelines, and developed AI-driven systems (e.g. agentic workflows, RAG, or synthetic data generation).
- Solid software engineering foundations. You understand version control, testing, MVP thinking, and iterative development.
- Exceptional discovery and problem framing. You enjoy working through ambiguity, asking the right questions, and translating business or research goals into clear AI data and evaluation strategies.
- Seniority and track record. 8+ years delivering complex AI, ML, or data projects end to end, with experience influencing technical direction beyond individual projects.
- Ownership mindset. You take responsibility for outcomes, make thoughtful trade-offs between time, cost, and quality, and are comfortable owning both technical and commercial success.
Toloka AI
Toloka AI creates data that powers leading GenAI models and innovations. They work with frontier labs, big tech, renowned AI startups, enterprises and non-profit research organizations worldwide. They use a combination of Experts + Crowd + Tech Platform to teach AI models to reason and evaluate their efficacy and safety. They have experts in more than 50 different domains and a global crowd representing over 100 countries and speaking 40+ languages. They are a well-funded startup with clients including Anthropic, Amazon, Microsoft, Poolside, Recraft, and Shopify. Recently secured strategic investment led by Bezos Expeditions and Nebius Group. Their remote-first team is globally distributed around the world: USA, UK, the Netherlands, Serbia, and more.