Applied AI Specialist

Business Area:

Corp. Strategy

Seniority Level:

Director

Job Description: 

At Cloudera, we empower people to transform complex data into clear and actionable insights. With as much data under management as the hyperscalers, we're the preferred data partner for the top companies in almost every industry.  Powered by the relentless innovation of the open source community, Cloudera advances digital transformation for the world’s largest enterprises.

About the Applied AI Team

The Applied AI team exists to help the world's largest enterprises move beyond AI experimentation and into production. Our mission is to identify, validate, and accelerate high-impact AI use cases that deliver measurable business outcomes across regulated and data-intensive industries. Working at the intersection of industry expertise, AI technology, and enterprise data platforms, we partner directly with customers to solve complex business challenges using machine learning, computer vision, predictive analytics, generative AI, and agentic systems, while developing the technical conviction needed to move initiatives from concept to production.

The team combines Applied AI Specialists, strategic ecosystem partners such as NVIDIA, and Forward Deployed Engineers (FDEs) in a unified operating model designed to rapidly move AI initiatives from discovery to deployment. Applied AI Specialists work directly with customers to discover opportunities, validate technical feasibility, and establish technical conviction, while FDE teams build and deploy qualified solutions. Together, we help organizations operationalize AI securely, govern it responsibly, and scale it across the enterprise.

About the Role

As an Applied AI Specialist, your mission is to identify, validate, and establish technical conviction around high-impact private AI use cases that can be successfully deployed into production. Operating within a specialized regional pod, you will lead technical discovery, execute deep-dive AI workshops, and collaborate closely with strategic ecosystem partners such as NVIDIA.

You will work directly with enterprise architects, data scientists, platform teams, and business stakeholders to evaluate AI opportunities, assess technical feasibility, and define clear implementation paths. Your focus is on separating low-conviction ideas from production-ready opportunities, ensuring that only the highest-value use cases advance into our engineering pipeline.

As an Applied AI Specialist, you'll:

Lead AI Discovery Workshops - Partner with strategic ecosystem providers, including NVIDIA, to design and facilitate highly technical hands-on workshops that identify, validate, and prioritize private AI opportunities.

Discover and Scope High-Value Use Cases - Conduct deep technical and business discovery with enterprise customers to identify AI workloads that can deliver measurable business outcomes and are suitable for production deployment.

Evaluate Enterprise AI Readiness - Assess data architecture, governance requirements, infrastructure constraints, security considerations, and data gravity challenges to determine the feasibility of Private AI deployments.

Develop Regional Domain Leadership - Serve as a subject matter expert within your regional pod, building deep expertise in one or more strategic industries while helping transfer successful AI patterns across customer segments.

Build Technical Assets - Develop lightweight proofs of concept, reference architectures, technical demonstrations, and solution frameworks that help customers validate feasibility before committing to full-scale implementation.

Define the Engineering Blueprint - Translate qualified opportunities into clear technical requirements, data specifications, success criteria, architectural recommendations, and scoped outcomes to ensure seamless handoff to FDE teams.

Capture and Scale Best Practices - Document successful use cases, architectural patterns, and implementation frameworks that can be reused across customers, industries, and regions.

We’re excited about you if you have:

The Builder Mindset - Strong technical foundation in data science. Comfortable working directly with code, APIs, notebooks, development frameworks, and enterprise architectures.

Hands-On AI Experience - Practical experience building or supporting AI applications across machine learning, deep learning, computer vision, time-series analytics, predictive modeling, anomaly detection, and generative AI. Comfortable discussing model architectures, training and evaluation methodologies, inference patterns, and production deployment considerations across a broad range of enterprise AI workloads.

Enterprise Discovery and Solutioning Experience - Proven success in technical pre-sales, solution architecture, consulting, customer engineering, or similar roles involving the discovery, qualification, and design of complex enterprise technology initiatives.

Data Readiness Assessment Skills - Ability to evaluate data quality, governance, security, compliance, operational readiness, and infrastructure constraints that impact successful private AI deployments.

Executive Communication Skills - Exceptional ability to engage technical and executive audiences, facilitating conversations that connect business outcomes with practical implementation strategies.

Technical Proficiency - Experience with Python, APIs, cloud-native architectures, data pipelines, MLOps, and modern AI development ecosystems.

You may also have:

• Experience working with NVIDIA AI Enterprise, NIMs, NeMo, RAPIDs or accelerated computing platforms.
• Experience delivering customer-facing workshops, design sessions, or architecture engagements.
• Experience moving AI projects from proof of concept into production environments.
• Familiarity with enterprise data platforms, governance frameworks, and hybrid cloud architectures.

What We Offer

Centralized Platform Support - You will never lose time troubleshooting cloud credentials, environment setup, or workshop preparation. A dedicated Global Workshop Platform Engineer builds, seeds, manages, and tears down workshop environments programmatically, allowing you to focus entirely on customer engagement and solution discovery.

Clean Operational Boundaries - Your mission is discovery, validation, and qualification. Once a use case has achieved technical conviction and is approved for execution, a dedicated FDE Pod assumes ownership of implementation and production delivery. This allows you to remain focused on uncovering the next strategic opportunity.

Direct Access to Industry Innovation - You will work alongside leading AI practitioners, strategic ecosystem partners, and enterprise innovators to help shape how AI is deployed across some of the world's largest organizations.

High-Impact Culture - You will be part of a highly visible, practitioner-led organization with executive sponsorship and a clear mandate to drive measurable business outcomes through AI.

Career Growth - As the Applied AI organization expands globally, you will have opportunities to deepen industry expertise, influence go-to-market strategy, mentor future practitioners, and help define the operating model for one of the company's most strategic growth initiatives.

What you can expect from us:

• Generous PTO Policy 

• Support work life balance with Unplugged Days

• Flexible WFH Policy 

• Mental & Physical Wellness programs 

• Phone and Internet Reimbursement program 

• Access to Continued Career Development 

• Comprehensive Benefits and Competitive Packages 

• Paid Volunteer Time

• Employee Resource Groups

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