Associate director machine learning engineering

Company Description

Spark Foundry is a global media agency that exists to bring HEAT - Higher Engagement, Affinity, and Transactions - to brands. By combining flawless media fundamentals with aggressive innovation, Spark inspires consumers to pay more attention, to care more about our clients’ brands, and to buy more products and services from them.

Balancing the nimble spirit of a startup with the powerhouse soul of Publicis Media, Spark Foundry delivers the best of both worlds to a client roster that spans some of the world’s best and most beloved brands and companies. We combine boutique-caliber insights and service with the buying clout and first-look access of a global leader, bringing the heat to challenger brands that want to act like giants, and to giant brands that want to act like challengers.

With a bottom-up culture that celebrates diversity and aims for all voices to be heard, Spark has become a magnet for the industry’s best talent, with one of the best retention rates in the industry. And by applying a whole-person approach to professional and personal development, Spark develops a workforce that is well prepared for today’s challenges, and also poised to create meaningful careers in the years to come.

Because we know that heat arises the intersection of complementary forces, our professionals come from myriad disciplines and backgrounds: data, analytics, and insights, content and creative production, communications and strategy, finance and marketing, and sociology, psychology, and other liberal arts disciplines.

Overview

Associate Director, ML & AI is a senior, hands-on engineering leader responsible for driving the design, development, and delivery of scalable ML & AI solutions. This role will own the technical direction of priority initiatives, establish engineering standards, and ensure high-quality execution across data engineering and AI/ML use cases. You’ll build GenAI-first solutions (LLM-powered assistants, insight synthesis, workflow automation) alongside traditional ML systems (forecasting, optimization, recommendations). This is a hands-on, product-focused role for someone who ships production systems not research prototypes.

The Associate Director will work closely with analytics and media teams to translate business requirements into robust technical solutions. This role is ideal for someone who enjoys building from scratch, setting direction, and unblocking teams , while remaining deeply involved in hands-on development.

Responsibilities

• Own the technical design and architecture for GenAI and ML solutions end to end
• Define standards for LLM usage, RAG patterns, evaluation, and production readiness
• Make architectural tradeoffs across scalability, cost, latency, and model quality
• Ensure GenAI solutions are secure, observable, and built for real-world use
• Lead development of GenAI applications, including LLM workflows, RAG pipelines, and inference services
• Build and optimize data pipelines and feature workflows to support GenAI and traditional ML use cases
• Develop production-grade APIs and backend services using cloud-native and distributed systems
• Troubleshoot complex issues across data quality, retrieval accuracy, model behavior, and system performance
• Drive priority AI initiatives from concept through production deployment
• Break down ambiguous problems into clear technical tasks, milestones, and MVPs
• Own delivery timelines, dependencies, and technical risk management
• Partner with stakeholders to balance speed, scope, and long-term maintainability
• Serve as the primary technical point of contact for GenAI and ML initiatives
• Translate business workflows into scalable technical designs
• Support stakeholder and client discussions requiring deep technical context
• Ensure alignment between upstream data sources and downstream AI consumption
• Leverage and extend existing AWS and Databricks infrastructure for GenAI workloads
• Integrate vector databases, orchestration frameworks, and ML platforms into a cohesive stack
• Establish monitoring, logging, and alerting AI pipelines, cost, latency, and quality
• Promote secure, compliant, and cost-aware engineering practices
• Mentor engineers and analysts through design reviews, code reviews, and technical guidance
• Support onboarding and skill development for GenAI and ML capabilities
• Foster a collaborative, high-ownership engineering culture
• Identify opportunities to simplify, automate, and modernize AI systems
• Evaluate new GenAI tools, models, and platforms and recommend adoption when appropriate
• Contribute to documentation, knowledge sharing, and long-term technical roadmap planning

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience in software engineering, data engineering, or platform development
• Proven ability to lead technical initiatives end-to-end
• Hands-on experience shipping GenAI / LLM-powered applications
• Strong understanding of RAG architectures, prompt engineering, and orchestration frameworks
• Experience with vector databases for semantic search
• Ability to build functional frontends (Streamlit, Gradio, React, etc.)
• Strong experience designing and building scalable data and analytics systems
• Advanced proficiency in SQL and strong experience with Python or similar languages
• Hands-on experience with cloud platforms (AWS preferred)
• Experience with distributed data processing frameworks (e.g., Spark, Databricks, Hadoop)
• Experience with orchestration and ETL tools such as Airflow, AWS Glue, Qubole, or similar
• Strong understanding of data modeling, system integration, and performance optimization
• Proven track record of shipping tools users actually adopt
• Experience working with Databricks, Redshift, Presto, or similar technologies
• Familiarity with ML pipelines and collaboration with data science teams
• Knowledge of embeddings, evaluation, and fine-tuning tradeoffs
• MLOps experience (deployment, monitoring, LLM evaluation)
• Experience in media, marketing, or digital analytics environments
• Prior experience acting as a tech lead or senior engineer mentoring others

Character

The following qualities help drive success as member of the Spark Data and Analytics team:

• Builders who enjoy turning complex problems into simple, reliable solutions
• Calm and decisive under pressure
• Collaborative leaders who elevate the team around them
• Pragmatic technologists who value outcomes over novelty
• Curious, adaptable, and continuously learning
• Strong problem-solving and system-thinking skills
• Comfortable operating in ambiguity and driving clarity
• Ability to communicate technical concepts clearly to non-technical stakeholders
• Bias toward action with strong ownership and accountability
• Ability to balance hands-on execution with leadership responsibilities
• Experience working in agile teams and participating in sprint ceremonies

Additional Information

Our Publicis Groupe motto “Viva La Différence” means we’re better together, and we believe that our differences make us stronger. It means we honor and celebrate all identities, across all facets of intersectionality, and it underpins all that we do as an organization. We are focused on fostering belonging and creating equitable & inclusive experiences for all talent.

Publicis Groupe provides robust and inclusive benefit programs and policies to support the evolving and diverse needs of our talent and enable every person to grow and thrive. Our benefits package includes medical coverage, dental, vision, disability, 401K, as well as parental and family care leave, family forming assistance, tuition reimbursement, and flexible time off. If you require accommodation or assistance with the application or onboarding process specifically, please contact [email protected].

Compensation Range: $110,580- $173,995 annually. This is the pay range the Company believes it will pay for this position at the time of this posting. Consistent with applicable law, compensation will be determined based on the skills, qualifications, and experience of the applicant along with the requirements of the position, and the Company reserves the right to modify this pay range at any time. Temporary roles may be eligible to participate in our freelancer/temporary employee medical plan through a third-party benefits administration system once certain criteria have been met. Temporary roles may also qualify for participation in our 401(k) plan after eligibility criteria have been met. For regular roles, the Company will offer medical coverage, dental, vision, disability, 401k, and paid time off. The Company anticipates the application deadline for this job posting will be 02/19/2026.

All your information will be kept confidential according to EEO guidelines.

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