AI/ML Engineer

At Ardanis, we’re seeking an AI/ML Engineering Specialist with solid experience in enterprise-grade machine learning systems, Cloudera ML stack integration, and RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) pipelines. The role involves end-to-end ownership of ML infrastructure, from data ingestion and feature engineering to model deployment, monitoring, and lifecycle automation. You’ll work closely with data engineers, ML scientists, and platform architects to operationalize AI workloads within distributed environments, ensuring performance, scalability, and reproducibility.

Responsibilities:

• Design and implement production-ready ML pipelines on the Cloudera Data Platform (CDP), integrating Cloudera Data Engineering, Data Science Workbench, and Machine Learning components.
• Develop and maintain RAG architectures, combining embedding models, vector databases, and LLM inference layers for enterprise-scale retrieval and reasoning.
• Integrate vector stores such as FAISS, Milvus, Pinecone, or ChromaDB into existing data pipelines and Cloudera ML workflows.
• Implement feature stores, model registries, and CI/CD pipelines for automated deployment and retraining using MLflow, Airflow, and Kubernetes.
• Optimize model inference latency and resource utilization in distributed environments (Spark, YARN, K8s).
• Develop REST/gRPC APIs and microservices to serve models and RAG endpoints.
• Monitor model drift, retraining triggers, and lineage using observability tools and metadata tracking systems.
• Collaborate with data platform engineers to ensure compliance with data governance, lineage, and access control standards in Cloudera.

Requirements

• Advanced proficiency in Python (FastAPI, Pandas, NumPy, Pydantic) with solid experience in Java and Scala for building data pipelines and distributed processing systems.
• Experienced across the full Machine Learning lifecycle using tools such as MLflow, DVC, Airflow, and Kubeflow for orchestration, tracking, and deployment.
• Skilled in managing containerized and distributed environments with Docker, Kubernetes, Spark, YARN, and the Cloudera ML stack (CDP).
• Expertise in designing and optimizing retrieval pipelines using FAISS, Pinecone, Milvus, and ChromaDB for vector search and embedding-based systems.
• Hands-on experience with LangChain, LlamaIndex, and custom RAG architectures, integrating LLMs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Hugging Face) into production environments.
• Strong background in CI/CD and GitOps workflows, leveraging ArgoCD, Jenkins, and GitHub Actions for automated ML deployment.
• Proficient in monitoring and observability using Prometheus, Grafana, and OpenTelemetry to ensure model and system performance.
• Deep understanding of version control and reproducibility with Git, MLflow Model Registry, and Cloudera ML tracking.
• Experience working in large-scale enterprise ML environments built on Cloudera CDP.
• Familiar with data governance, GDPR compliance, data masking, and access control policies.
• Exposure to semantic search, embedding optimization, and prompt orchestration for retrieval-augmented AI systems.
• Strong grasp of distributed systems and data-intensive workloads at petabyte scale.
• Certified in Cloudera Data Platform, AWS, or GCP Machine Learning.

You’ll be joining a cross-functional engineering team that designs, deploys, and maintains production-grade AI infrastructure. The environment is highly collaborative, code-driven, and version-controlled, with emphasis on reproducibility, data lineage, and system observability. We expect strong ownership, deep understanding of MLOps principles, and the ability to reason about trade-offs in performance, scalability, and model lifecycle management.