AI / ML Engineer - Hourly Contract

Stevens is a strategic advisory and technology firm that partners with companies on high-impact transformation and technology initiatives. We work closely with executive and technology leaders to solve complex problems, identify opportunities, and turn strategy into working solutions.

We’re looking for an experienced AI / ML Engineer to join Stevens on an hourly contract basis and work as part of our delivery teams on enterprise client engagements.

Our AI work goes well beyond prototypes. We build production systems that need to perform reliably inside real businesses. Depending on the engagement, that may include LLM-powered applications, retrieval and knowledge systems, agentic workflows, evaluation infrastructure, machine learning pipelines, or integrating AI capabilities into complex existing systems.

You’ll be assigned to a Stevens delivery pod alongside engineers, technical leadership, project management, and client stakeholders. We expect our engineers to take ownership of their work, contribute to technical decisions, and be comfortable operating in demanding enterprise environments.

Depending on the engagement, you will

• Design and build production-grade AI and machine learning systems
• Build applications and services using LLMs and foundation models
• Develop RAG, semantic search, embeddings, retrieval, and knowledge systems
• Design agentic and tool-using AI workflows
• Build backend services, APIs, and integrations supporting AI applications
• Design evaluation frameworks and systematically measure AI system quality
• Work with structured and unstructured enterprise data
• Integrate AI capabilities into existing enterprise applications and systems
• Evaluate models, architectures, and tooling based on business and technical requirements
• Optimize AI systems for reliability, latency, scalability, and cost
• Implement appropriate testing, observability, and production safeguards
• Participate in architecture discussions, technical