Applied AI Solution Engineer

Company Description
Kearney is a global management consulting firm operating in more than 40 countries. We work alongside clients to solve complex business challenges and turn strategy into tangible outcomes.
Our Data & AI team within Kearney Activate brings together strategy, data, product, engineering, and AI to help organizations create real business value from technology with trust, governance, and responsible adoption at the core.
Role Description
We are looking for Applied AI / Senior AI Solutions Engineers who enjoy working in a forward deployed, builder mode close to clients, business problems, and technology.
You will work across the AI lifecycle: understanding business problems, shaping the solution, rapidly prototyping, building, deploying, and helping drive adoption of production grade AI solutions.
The role spans Generative AI, LLMs, agents, machine learning, data and application engineering, with an emphasis on solving real world problems rather than building technology in isolation.
You will:
* Work directly with clients and consulting teams to translate business problems into AI solutions
* Design and build GenAI, LLM and agentic applications, including RAG, tool use, workflows and multi-agent systems
* Develop prototypes and take successful ideas toward scalable production solutions
* Integrate AI into enterprise applications, APIs, data platforms and existing technology ecosystems
* Evaluate models and architectures across quality, latency, cost, reliability and security
* Work cross-functionally across data, applications, product, engineering and business teams
* Apply responsible AI, governance, observability and security principles throughout the solution lifecycle
* Stay close to the rapidly evolving AI ecosystem and experiment with emerging models, frameworks and approaches
Qualifications
* 3+ years of relevant experience in AI/ML, software engineering, data science or related engineering roles
* Strong software engineering fundamentals and hands-on proficiency in Python
* Experience building applications using LLMs, Generative AI and/or agentic systems
* Understanding of concepts such as RAG, embeddings, vector search, tool/function calling, structured outputs and model evaluation
* Experience working with APIs, databases, cloud platforms and production software systems
* Ability to move comfortably between business requirements and technical implementation
* Strong problem-solving skills and willingness to build, experiment and iterate quickly
* Ability to communicate technical concepts clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders
Additional notes:
Experience with cloud AI platforms, ML/LLM operations, data engineering, enterprise architecture, or deploying AI systems at scale is a plus.
Most importantly, we are looking for builders who are curious about what is possible with AI and equally focused on making it useful, trusted, and impactful in the real world.

Work arrangement
Hybrid