Senior AI Engineer

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.

The Information Technology team has the mission of becoming a true business partner and we are searching for a Senior AI Engineer to help execute on this mission. 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:

• 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 data scientists, 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:

• Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Data Science, or a related field.
• 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.
• Strong proficiency in Python for data processing and manipulation.
• Experience with SQL and Spark to handle data extraction, transformation, and loading of big data.
• 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).
• Hands-on experience with API utilization, development, and management.
• Practical experience with event-driven architecture and real-time data processing.
• Ability to effectively communicate technical concepts to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Experience with data analysis and statistical modeling using the Python ecosystem, with packages such as numpy, pandas, statsmodels, scikit-learn, etc.
• Experience working with various machine learning / deep learning algorithms and frameworks.
• Self-starter, comfortable with ambiguity, ability to initiate and drive projects with minimal oversight and guidance.
• 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.
• Familiarity with PowerBI for developing interactive reports and data visualizations.
• Experience with LLMs and OpenAI APIs.
• Experience shipping code into production.
• Experience in the investment banking or financial sector.

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

Be aware of hiring scams: William Blair has clear processes and guidelines with regards to recruiting. We do not request personal financial information in connection with an employment application nor does William Blair extend any employment offers without first conducting an interview through one of its registered offices. William Blair does not use instant messaging services such as WhatsApp, Telegram, or iMessage as part of the recruiting or interviewing process.