AI/ML Engineer

Seeking a Cognitive Linguist - Onsite for a contract position located in Charlotte, NC, Pennington, NJ, or Plano, TX. This is a 12+ month contract opportunity. The successful candidate will be responsible for architecting, developing, and maintaining machine learning models and NLU frameworks that identify end-user intent across a multi-channel Virtual Assistant platform. This role focuses on designing scalable conversational AI solutions, optimizing model performance, and ensuring the underlying intent recognition architecture effectively supports web, mobile, and voice-based experiences. Responsibilities: Architect and maintain the NLU intent framework across enterprise domains (e.g., Technology, Human Resources), ensuring alignment with conversational solution design patterns for web, mobile, and voice experiences Design, engineer, and curate training and validation datasets to support machine learning pipelines for intent classification, speech recognition, and conversational AI performance optimization Develop and maintain model evaluation frameworks, telemetry pipelines, and observability tools to measure accuracy, reliability, and operational performance, enabling data-driven model tuning throughout the development lifecycle Design scalable disambiguation, fallback, and error-handling architectures that improve resilience and user experience as virtual assistant capabilities expand across domains and channels Analyze conversational telemetry, interaction flows, and runtime performance metrics to identify gaps, root causes, and optimization opportunities, implementing architectural improvements that enhance system effectiveness Partner with data scientists, product owners, UX researchers, and software engineers to design, build, and evolve the cognitive architecture and decisioning framework that powers the virtual assistant ecosystem Requirements: Proven experience architecting and maintaining NLU intent frameworks Experience designing and curating datasets for machine learning pipelines Ability to develop model evaluation frameworks and telemetry pipelines Knowledge of designing scalable error-handling architectures for virtual assistants Experience with Microsoft Office, including Excel Redolent