Operations Research & Applied AI Engineer Job Downers Grove area,Illinois USA,Software Development

We are seeking an experienced Operations Research & Applied AI Engineer to build and grow our advanced analytics capabilities. This role combines mathematical optimization with applied artificial intelligence, and it carries responsibility both for maintaining and improving the systems we have today and for identifying, designing, and delivering the ones we do not yet have. The ideal candidate is a hands‑on practitioner with genuine depth in optimization and practical experience putting AI applications into production.

We care about demonstrated capability rather than credentials, and substantial hands‑on experience can stand in place of an advanced degree. This is a builder's role. We expect the person in this seat to look at how the business plans, prices, and moves freight, recognize where a decision is being made by intuition that could be made by a model, and make the case for solving it.

Over time, the scope of this position is expected to expand well beyond its starting systems as new opportunities are identified and delivered. This role requires someone who can reason rigorously about model design and solution quality, insist on measurable evaluation before anything reaches production, and then explain the resulting business trade-offs to the leaders who act on them. Experience in the transportation and logistics industry is preferred, as the role involves working with data related to network and capacity planning, service performance, fleet and driver operations, and freight documentation.

What

you’ll do

Optimization & Operations Research Design, build, maintain, and improve mathematical optimization models supporting network planning, capacity and resource allocation, routing, and related operational decisions.

Formulate and solve large-scale mixed-integer and network flow problems and select appropriate exact or heuristic methods based on problem structure and the time available to solve.

Establish and maintain rigorous solution quality measurement, including derived bounds, so that the value of every model change can be demonstrated rather than asserted.

Translate model parameters, penalties, and constraints into the business trade-offs they represent, and adjust them in partnership with operational stakeholders.

Applied AI Solution Development Design and deliver applied AI applications that automate manual processes, extract structured data from unstructured sources, and support operational decision-making.

Move AI solutions from prototype to production, including hosting and scheduling, continuous integration, versioning of prompts and output schemas, structured logging, monitoring, and human review paths for low‑confidence output.

Design and maintain evaluation frameworks for AI output, including curated ground‑truth sets, accuracy measurement, and regression gates that determine objectively whether a change improved results.

Stay current with developments in applied AI and optimization, and assess which are worth adopting in an operational environment.

Opportunity Identification & Solution Design Assess business processes across operations, pricing, sales, and finance to identify opportunities where optimization or AI would deliver measurable value.

Build the business case for new initiatives, including expected impact, feasibility, data requirements, and level of effort, and present recommendations to leadership.

Prototype quickly to test whether an approach is viable, and be equally willing to recommend against building something when the evidence does not support it.

Scale successful prototypes into supported production systems with documented design decisions and a defined owner.

Model Validation & Benchmarking Benchmark system output against actual business results to confirm that modeled improvements translate into realized ones.

Distinguish genuine improvement from run‑to‑run variation, and document negative results as rigorously as positive ones so that approaches are not re‑attempted without cause.

Build and maintain the testing and validation infrastructure that keeps analytical systems correct as they change.

Stakeholder Engagement & Business Partnership Partner with Operations,…