Senior Consultant, Artificial Intelligence Engineer

At Pioneer Management Consulting, we believe people are at the heart of every successful transformation. We started Pioneer in 2009 with a simple idea: create jobs people love, serve companies we admire, and fund start-ups that are driving innovative good in the world. Built on our three core values; Humble, Hungry, Connected, we deliver world-class consulting with small-town heart and hustle. We are an elite team of problem solvers who unabashedly love business.

We partner with clients to solve critical business challenges while fostering environments where individuals and teams can thrive. Team Pioneer brings curiosity, empathy, and expertise to every interaction, ensuring that change is not only implemented but embraced. When you join Pioneer, you become part of a collaborative, supportive community dedicated to making a real difference. We’re a team of moms, dads, coaches, explorers, and creators who do meaningful work together.

As a Senior Consultant, Artificial Intelligence Engineer, you will play a pivotal role in shaping and delivering enterprise-grade, data-centric AI solutions that help clients solve complex business problems and drive measurable outcomes. You are a senior, self-directed consultant who operates comfortably across architecture, hands-on technical delivery, and client leadership.

In this role, you will serve as a trusted advisor to client leaders while also acting as a technical lead and builder—designing, implementing, and scaling AI systems that sit on modern data platforms. Your work will span agentic AI, RAG architectures, analytics + ML pipelines, and AI-enabled applications, primarily within the Microsoft ecosystem.

You bring a strong engineering mindset—particularly with Python, modern data platforms (Microsoft Fabric, Databricks, Snowflake), Azure AI Foundry, and vector-based retrieval systems—and are comfortable owning solutions end to end, from data ingestion through AI inference and user-facing experiences. You are fluent in both hands-on ML/AI development and low-code/no-code AI tooling, and you leverage AI-native development environments to accelerate delivery.

Responsibilities:

• Serve as a client-facing lead on AI initiatives—advising senior stakeholders on architecture tradeoffs, build vs. buy, platform selection, and adoption strategy—while translating business goals into pragmatic AI and data roadmaps.

• Lead the end-to-end design and hands-on delivery of AI solutions, including RAG, agentic workflows, ML-enabled analytics pipelines, and AI-powered applications and copilots.

• Write and review production-grade code; own solution architecture across ingestion, transformation, storage, retrieval, model orchestration, and inference.

• Design and implement ETL/ELT pipelines in Python on modern data platforms (Microsoft Fabric, Databricks, and/or Snowflake), optimizing data structures for analytics, ML, and vector retrieval.

• Rapidly deliver POCs and MVPs, and build reusable accelerators and reference architectures that scale across engagements.

• Mentor consultants and collaborate with strategists, engineers, and change practitioners to deliver cohesive, governed, responsibly-designed AI systems.

Requirements:
• 5+ years in consulting, data engineering, analytics, or AI solution delivery, with proven ownership of client-facing technical workstreams and production-ready AI/ML outcomes.

• Strong hands-on development in Python, with deep experience in data transformation, modeling, and machine learning; SQL familiarity is a plus but not required.

• Hands-on experience with modern data platforms—Microsoft Fabric, Databricks, and/or Snowflake—plus Azure AI Foundry for LLM orchestration and AI application development.

• Proven experience designing and implementing RAG and agentic/multi-agent architectures, including prompt engineering, tool calling, and structured outputs; working knowledge of vector databases (Azure AI Search preferred) and LLM lifecycle concerns (evaluation, versioning, monitoring, cost).

• Proven experience developing and deploying custom AI and ML solutions in production environments, including model training, evaluation, versioning, monitoring, and inference; solid ML fundamentals (feature engineering, model selection, pipelines) with hands-on experience using frameworks such as scikit-learn, PyTorch, or MLflow.

• Strong consulting presence: able to translate ambiguous business problems into clear technical designs, facilitate architecture sessions with senior stakeholders, and lead small technical teams.

• Proficiency with AI-native development environments and IDE agent platforms such as Cursor, Claude Desktop, or equivalent tools; demonstrated use of these environments to accelerate code authoring, refactoring, and solution delivery.

• Experience with CI/CD pipelines and modern DevOps practices for AI/ML workloads (e.g., automated testing, deployment pipelines, model lifecycle management in production).

• Hands-on experience with low-code and no-code AI tools (e.g., Microsoft Copilot, Claude Desktop, Copilot Studio) to prototype, augment, and accelerate solution delivery alongside traditional development.

Preferred: Copilot Studio / custom copilots / Power Platform AI experience; background in regulated or asset-intensive industries (utilities, energy, manufacturing, financial services); prior contribution to AI strategy or enterprise AI enablement; SQL experience for data transformation and analytics.

Location:

Must be local to Minneapolis, MN or Denver, CO for flexible, hybrid schedule.

Benefits:
The estimated salary range for this role is $110,000 - $165,000 annually, based on a wide array of factors including skillset, years of experience, and role scope. Compensation may vary by location. Bonuses and other incentives are awarded at the Company’s discretion and are based upon individual contributions and overall company performance.

Pioneer offers a comprehensive benefits package including meaningful time off and paid holidays, parental leave, 401(k) with employer match, tuition reimbursement, and a broad range of health and welfare benefits including medical, dental, vision, life, and short- and long-term disability.

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