Senior AI Engineer

VERSANT is a leading force in news, sports and entertainment - home to iconic and trusted brands that inspire, inform, and delight audiences. Our unique combination of content, technology and services enriches the cultural fabric, igniting passions, sparking conversations, and connecting people to what they love most.

As an independent, publicly traded company, VERSANT brings together powerhouse cable networks - including USA Network, CNBC, MS NOW (formerly MSNBC), Oxygen, E!, SYFY, and Golf Channel - with dynamic digital and direct-to-consumer brands such as Fandango, Rotten Tomatoes, Golf Now, Golf Pass, and Sports Engine. Together, these businesses reflect our commitment to delivering exceptional experiences across every screen and service.

VERSANT is an industry-changing media company fueled by innovation and an entrepreneurial spirit. With a strong foundation and a forward-looking vision, VERSANT empowers creativity, embraces change, and drives connection in an ever-evolving world.

As a Senior AI/ML Engineer on the AI Experience team, you will play a critical role in designing, building, and operationalizing intelligent systems that enhance content discovery, personalization, search, editorial workflows, and audience experiences across VERSANT digital platforms.

You’ll work with Python, Java, Lang Chain, AWS, Open Search, and a range of modern AI models to deliver scalable machine learning and generative AI capabilities. You will build services that support retrieval-augmented generation, semantic search, model integration, prompt orchestration, evaluation, and production‑grade AI workflows.

You will contribute not only through strong engineering and applied AI expertise, but also through mentorship, architectural input, responsible AI practices, and a commitment to building reliable, measurable, and maintainable AI/ML‑enabled products.

Senior AI/ML Engineers at VERSANT go beyond model experimentation. They turn ambiguous business needs into practical AI solutions, mentor teams on sound ML and software engineering practices, and help shape a culture of responsible innovation. They partner across product, editorial, data, and engineering teams to deliver systems that are reliable, scalable, observable, and aligned with business priorities.

• Partner with product, data science, editorial, analytics, and design teams to define clear, practical AI and ML requirements
• Mentor engineers through architecture reviews, design discussions, code reviews, pairing, and onboarding
• Promote engineering, ML, and responsible AI best practices across the team
• Identify and solve systemic team issues that impact delivery, model quality, reliability, or operational excellence
• Participate in and help guide conversations around AI architecture, emerging model capabilities, search relevance, and media industry trends
• Champion a user‑first mindset, advocating for AI solutions that improve content performance, editorial productivity, and audience experience

• Design and deliver end‑to‑end AI/ML services that support content intelligence, semantic search, recommendations, automation, and generative AI use cases
• Build and maintain production services using Python, Java, REST, and event‑driven patterns
• Develop AI applications and orchestration workflows using Lang Chain and related frameworks
• Integrate with large language models, embedding models, multimodal models, and domain‑specific AI services
• Design prompt engineering strategies, prompt templates, guardrails, and evaluation workflows for generative AI systems
• Use AWS services to deploy, monitor, secure, and scale ML‑enabled applications and data pipelines
• Implement search, vector search, and retrieval‑augmented generation patterns using Open Search and related indexing strategies
• Promote test coverage, model evaluation, secure development, and responsible AI practices
• Drive adoption of reusable AI platform patterns and help evolve shared ML engineering capabilities
• Debug, profile, and optimize model integrations, inference workflows, search relevance, latency, and cost
• Collaborate with SREs and platform teams to ensure AI services are…