Senior AI Engineer & Lead

SKO Systems is seeking a hands-on Senior AI Engineer & Lead to establish and lead its AI team. The role involves designing, developing, and deploying production-ready AI/ML and Generative AI solutions across cruise technology products, including passenger processing, identity verification, document processing, digital mustering, and crew scheduling.

The ideal candidate will combine strong technical expertise in Python, LLMs, RAG, and Azure AI services with the ability to lead engineers, drive AI adoption across product teams, and translate business requirements into scalable, commercially viable AI solutions.

Key Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and deploy production-grade AI/ML and LLM-based applications.
• Build RAG pipelines, AI agents, intelligent assistants, and document-processing solutions.
• Integrate AI capabilities with existing .NET backend services, Angular web applications, and Android mobile applications through REST APIs.
• Leverage Azure AI services to build scalable and reliable AI solutions.
• Define AI architecture, evaluation frameworks, and performance metrics for accuracy, latency, reliability, and cost.
• Drive AI strategy and roadmap in alignment with product and business objectives.
• Implement AI-assisted engineering tools to improve developer productivity, code quality, testing, and documentation.
• Ensure responsible AI practices, data privacy, security, and appropriate human oversight.
• Lead, mentor, and manage AI engineers while establishing coding, testing, and documentation standards.
• Collaborate with Product, Engineering, QA, Sales, and other stakeholders to deliver measurable business outcomes.
• Support customer demonstrations, pilot projects, and the commercialization of AI capabilities.

Requirements

Education and Experience

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field.
• 8+ years of software engineering experience, including at least 3 years building and deploying ML or LLM-based features in production.
• At least 1 year of experience leading or mentoring engineers.
• Proven experience delivering AI solutions to customers with measurable business outcomes.

Technical Skills

• Strong programming expertise in Python 3.11+.
• Hands-on experience with Generative AI, LLMs, RAG, prompt engineering, tool/function calling, and AI agents.
• Experience with LangChain, LangGraph, or Semantic Kernel.
• Strong knowledge of Azure OpenAI, Azure AI Search, and Azure AI Document Intelligence or Vision.
• Experience with REST API development and integration with .NET/C# backends.
• Working knowledge of SQL, data modelling, and Microsoft SQL Server.
• Experience evaluating AI/LLM outputs using test datasets, performance metrics, and regression testing.
• Familiarity with Docker and Azure DevOps CI/CD pipelines.

Preferred Skills

• Computer vision, facial recognition, biometric verification, and liveness detection.
• On-device AI inference using ONNX Runtime Mobile, TensorFlow Lite, or Google ML Kit.
• Experience in cruise, travel, aviation, hospitality, or other regulated industries.
• Knowledge of Kubernetes, model registries, and model drift monitoring.
• Azure AI Engineer Associate, Azure Data Scientist Associate, or equivalent certifications.

Core Competencies

• Strong analytical and problem-solving abilities.
• Technical leadership, mentoring, and team-building skills.
• Excellent communication and stakeholder management.
• Ability to translate business challenges into practical AI solutions.
• Focus on responsible AI, data security, cost optimization, and production reliability.