Senior Associate, AI Deployment and Production - DATS

The Senior Associate, AI Deployment & Production will be a senior member of the Applied Engineering Solutions team within StepStone’s DATS department. This person is an expert Python engineer who helps the AI research team write better code and brings their work to robust production. They own the productionization framework around AI solutions — a clean, well-designed package API, async orchestrators (Celery or equivalent), sensible REST endpoints, and the data models the solution requires — and review AI projects to raise code quality. The role also carries low-level language depth (C, C++, or Rust) used for optimization, including rewriting performance-critical paths and migrating business logic out of the firm’s PHP systems into faster implementations. This role suits an engineer who is equally strong at software design, productionization, and performance work.

• Review AI research projects and raise the quality of their Python code design (module/class/function structure, typing, testing, packaging)
• Build out the production framework for AI solutions: a well-designed package/library API, async scalable orchestrators, coherent REST endpoints, and the data models the solution requires
• Take research and prototype AI code to scalable, reliable production, owning quality and standards before release
• Apply low-level language skills (C, C++, or Rust) to optimize performance-critical paths as needed
• Lead optimization of the firm’s PHP workloads: implement low-level alternatives where warranted, or re-architect so Python (or a low-level service) owns the business logic and PHP simply calls it
• Partner with QA to define and meet testing and acceptance goals; build monitoring and validation around AI pipelines
• Contribute to shared frameworks (private PyPI/polyrepo packaging) and DevOps (GitHub Actions, Helm-based deployment)
• Mentor analysts and associates and act as a senior reviewer for AI and engineering work

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer science, Engineering, a quantitative field, or equivalent practical experience
• 6+ years of software/data engineering experience, including production ownership and demonstrable technical leadership or mentorship
• Expert Python: idiomatic, well-structured code (modules/classes/functions), strong testing and packaging discipline, and hands-on experience taking research/prototype code to scalable production
• Production experience with Celery (or comparable async/distributed task orchestration), Flask (or similar) services, and SQLAlchemy (or comparable ORM) data modeling
• Working proficiency in at least one low-level language (C, C++, or Rust) for performance optimization
• Demonstrated ability to lead code review and own quality for a team — not just individual deliverables
• Strong communication skills; comfortable partnering with research teams and owning JIRA coordination

• AI engineering experience: ETL and RAG pipelines, LLM API integration, document extraction
• Experience profiling and optimizing performance-critical code, and interfacing low-level code with Python (e.g., bindings/extensions)
• Familiarity with PHP
• Familiarity with Kubernetes and GitHub Actions (or comparable CI/CD)
• Familiarity with finance, private markets, or investment data domains

Salary Range: $140,000