Senior AI Engineer with Databricks Experience (Contract)

About the role

Hiflylabs, a data and technology consultancy of 250+ people based in Budapest, is looking for a Senior AI Engineer on a contract basis. You will own the architecture and delivery of production-grade LLM systems and classical ML solutions, and architect distributed GenAI and ML workloads on Databricks.

Key responsibilities

• Design, evaluate and optimize RAG pipelines (retrieval strategy, chunking, indexing, monitoring).
• Build scalable, production-grade LLM services and agentic workflows alongside traditional ML systems.
• Define architecture trade-offs (LLM vs traditional ML, fine-tuning vs RAG, hosted vs self-managed models) with a focus on latency, cost, scalability and reliability.
• Architect and optimize distributed GenAI and ML workloads on Databricks (Spark, MLflow).
• Implement evaluation frameworks measuring quality, hallucination and performance.
• Productionize systems with CI/CD, monitoring, rollback and versioning.
• Lead technical decisions in client engagements and contribute to pre-sales architecture discussions.
• Mentor team members and define GenAI and ML best practices.

Required profile

• 5+ years of experience in data science or a related field.
• Proven experience delivering LLM-based systems to production, not only PoCs, plus classical ML projects.
• Ability to independently design end-to-end AI solutions for client problems.
• Client-facing experience and openness to pre-sales work.
• Clear, confident English in technical discussions.

Required skills

• Strong hands-on experience with RAG, agents and open-source LLMs.
• Deep understanding of system-level trade-offs and experience optimizing production systems.
• Strong Python and SQL skills.
• Hands-on Databricks and Spark, including performance optimization.
• Deploying scalable ML/LLM systems on AWS, Azure or GCP.