Protective Life
AI/ML Engineering Lead
$124K–$180K
Birmingham, AL +2 · Hybrid · Full-time · Posted Sep 14, 2026
- Location
- Birmingham, AL
Nebraska - Virtual
Work From Home - Experience
- 8+ years in software, data, or ML engineering, including several years building and operating production ML systems.
- Education
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Data Science, Statistics, Engineering, or a related field — or equivalent practical experience.
About the job
Leads hands-on development and governed production deployment of machine learning and generative AI systems on Protective Life’s Azure Databricks Lakehouse.
What you'll do
- Lead ML and GenAI systems from problem framing and data sourcing through deployment, monitoring, and retraining; set ML lifecycle engineering standards.
- Build MLOps and GenAI capabilities, including model serving, RAG, evaluation, guardrails, and CI/CD; monitor model performance, cost, and drift.
- Mentor engineers and partner with product, Model Risk, governance, legal, and security teams on reliable, documented, fair, and compliant models.
What they ask for
- 8+ years in software, data, or ML engineering, including several years building and operating production ML systems.
- Technical leadership experience, including mentoring engineers, setting standards, and leading non-trivial system design.
- Strong Python and SQL; end-to-end ML lifecycle experience and common ML frameworks.
- Experience delivering GenAI/LLM applications, modern data stack and Databricks lakehouse, Azure DevOps CI/CD, and Microsoft Azure.
Nice to have
- Financial services or insurance ML experience and familiarity with model risk management.
- Familiarity with Databricks Mosaic AI, Feature Store / Unity Catalog features, Vector Search, or Azure Machine Learning.
Pay
USD 124,500–180,000 per-year-salary (base salary)
Tools
Python, SQL, MLflow, Azure Databricks, dlt (dltHub), dbt, Dagster, Azure DevOps (ADO)
AI focus
Build and operate production ML and GenAI/LLM systems, including RAG, embeddings, vector search, evaluation, guardrails, monitoring, and responsible-AI governance.
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative