Associate AI Engineer

The Associate AI Engineer supports the development, deployment, and maintenance of AI applications for Columbia University Irving Medical Center (CUIMC). Working with senior engineers and cross-functional teams, the role builds solutions for administrative, research, clinical, and educational operations, including applications using large language models, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), automation frameworks, and machine learning.

Responsibilities

• Design and maintain RAG-enabled applications for knowledge discovery, workflow automation, and decision support. Build scalable tools and services that integrate with CUIMC systems, and create proof-of-concept prototypes to assess new technologies and demonstrate feasibility.
• Optimize prompts, pipelines, and model workflows; troubleshoot application and performance issues in development and production; and document architectures, workflows, and implementations.
• Explore emerging AI technologies relevant to healthcare and higher education, prototype with open-source tools and AI platforms, and present findings to stakeholders.
• Support privacy, transparency, security, ethical data use, and compliance with institutional data-governance and review requirements. Contribute to responsible-AI practices and work with engineers, analysts, data scientists, and stakeholders to assess needs and recommend solutions.

Qualifications

• Required: A bachelor's degree or equivalent combination of education and experience, plus four years of experience.
• Preferred: A bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Artificial Intelligence, Statistics, or an equivalent combination of education and experience; a master's degree in a related discipline; and at least four years of professional experience in software engineering, AI, machine learning, data engineering, or a related technical field. Preferred experience includes application development and testing, data pipelines, LLMs, generative AI, RAG, cloud deployment, NLP, data extraction, and analytics involving structured and unstructured data. Familiarity with AI orchestration tools, Agile practices, and Git-based collaboration is also preferred.

The position is listed as full-time, regular, at 35 hours per week. The salary range is $127,000–$143,100; the finalist's salary depends on factors including qualifications, experience, education, training, and departmental budgets.