Senior Applied AI Product Engineer

As a Senior Applied AI Product Engineer at Kearney, you will contribute to consulting project teams as they offer honest advice and practical guidance to our clients. Depending on each clients unique needs, projects can differ in length, size, and location, giving you unique, hands-on experiences across a range of industries and service practices.

Responsibilities

1. Build end-to-end AI solutions

• Design and ship web applications, APIs, data pipelines, and agentic workflows across the Velocity AI platform.
• Own delivery from problem framing and technical design through demo, deployment, and iteration.
• Build both rapid prototypes for live client discussions and durable product capabilities that can scale beyond a single engagement.

2. Develop domain-aware AI workflows

• Build retrieval, extraction, comparison, reasoning, and recommendation workflows over product lifecycle data.
• Work with documents, spreadsheets, BOMs, specifications, supplier data, commodity inputs, teardown information, and cost models.
• Create digital concepts and decision-support tools for use cases such as new product development, formulation, should costing, BOM simplification, supplier choice, supply risk, and raw material or commodity trade-offs.

3. Engineer quality into the product

• Build automated test suites, evaluation harnesses, regression checks, and synthetic or golden datasets as part of normal development.
• Measure output quality, latency, cost, and failure modes for AI-powered workflows.
• Treat testing as an engineering responsibility, not a separate downstream hand-off.

4. Use AI-native engineering methods

• Work effectively with AI coding assistants and agentic development environments to accelerate delivery.
• Design robust prompts, structured outputs, tool use, fallback logic, and error handling patterns.
• Balance speed with maintainability, security, observability, and sound software design.

5. Collaborate directly with clients and domain experts

• Translate partner and client needs into working solution concepts with minimal ceremony.
• Explain technical trade-offs clearly to mixed technical and non-technical audiences.
• Iterate quickly based on feedback from client conversations, expert review, and real-world testing.

Who you are

• After nearly 100 years, we know this business is fundamentally about making connectionsbetween facts, figures, insights, strategies, tools, technologies, and above all, people. Thats why we look for collaborative, insightful, and inquisitive problem-solvers who dont accept the first thing in front of them and who are always unapologetically themselves.

We want to hear from you if you are:

• Ready to share your ideas and contribute as soon as you join a team
• Analytically inclined and enjoy solving problems
• Able to prioritize and are a doer by nature
• 5 - 10 Years (flexible for exceptional builders) experience
• Strong hands-on engineering in Python plus TypeScript or JavaScript.

• Experience building modern UIs with React, Next.js, or equivalent frameworks.
• Experience building backend services with FastAPI, Flask, Node.js, NestJS, or equivalent stacks.
• Practical experience with LLM APIs and/or open-source models, tool calling, structured outputs, retrieval pipelines, multimodal extraction, and agent patterns.
• Comfort working with SQL databases, vector stores, and document-centric data pipelines.
• Ability to build automated tests, eval harnesses, CI checks, and reliability safeguards for both deterministic and AI-driven features.
• Strong product judgment and the ability to translate business context into working software decisions.

Client-Facing Mindset

• Communicate clearly with senior client stakeholders, domain experts, and non-technical audiences.
• Translate messy business problems into crisp technical or product decisions.
• Understand where AI can add value in real product and operations workflows rather than chasing novelty.

Personal Traits

• High agency and ownership: you move from ambiguity to action without waiting for perfect instructions.
• Speed with judgment: you move fast, but you know where rigor matters.
• Curiosity and range: you enjoy learning new tools, domains, and problem spaces.
• Low ego, high collaboration: you work well with partners, clients, and specialists across disciplines.
• Responsible use of AI: you care about security, reliability, and practical value, not just impressive demos.

Nice to Have

• Experience with PLM, ERP, MES, CAD-adjacent, engineering, sourcing, or manufacturing data.
• Experience with local or open-source model deployment, GPU workloads, or on-premise AI systems.
• Exposure to benchmark, teardown, should-cost, BOM, procurement, or supply chain decision workflows.
• Strong rapid-prototyping instincts and a portfolio of shipped internal tools, products, or client solutions.

What we can offer you

Every day, our people work to be the difference for our clients, our communities, and our colleagues. Helping them make an impact, they are sustained by a competitive remuneration package plus comprehensive benefits and perks, including but not limited to:

• Generous retirement/pension savings contributions
• Comprehensive medical insurance for employees and their families
• Non-partner equity-based awards (for consulting managers and above)
• Structured and on-the-job learning and development opportunities
• Personalized opportunities including talent mobility, flexible work programs and externships to help you chart a unique career journey to pursue your own personal and professional goals