Senior Software Engineer, AI

WORK OPTION: Remote

The NBA is committed to providing a safe and healthy workplace.  To safeguard our employees and their families, our visitors, and the broader community from COVID-19, and in consideration of recommendations from health authorities and the NBA’s own advisors, any individual working onsite in our New York and New Jersey offices must be fully vaccinated against COVID-19. The NBA will discuss accommodations for individuals who cannot be vaccinated due to a medical reason or sincerely held religious belief, practice, or observance.

The National Basketball Association (NBA) is a global sports and media organization with the mission to inspire and connect people everywhere through the power of basketball.  Built around five professional sports leagues:  the NBA, WNBA, NBA G League, NBA 2K League and Basketball Africa League, the NBA has established a major international presence with games and programming available in 214 countries and territories in 60 languages, and merchandise for sale in more than 200 countries and territories on all seven continents.  NBA rosters at the start of the 2023-24 season featured a record 125 international players from 40 countries and territories.  NBA Digital’s assets include NBA TV, NBA.com, the NBA App and NBA League Pass.  The NBA has created one of the largest social media communities in the world, with more than 2.3 billion likes and followers globally across all leagues, team and player platforms.  NBA Cares, the NBA’s global social responsibility platform, partners with renowned community-based organizations around the world to address important social issues in the areas of education, inclusion, youth and family development, and health and wellness. 

Group Summary:
The NBA's Direct to Consumer Products, Technology & Operations (DTC PTO) department is responsible for enhancing fan affinity and reach through world-class broadcasts and digital offerings that are globally accessible and unified through a personalized journey. The DTC PTO team oversees the underlying operations & technology that supports the NBA's broadcast distribution and digital product offerings including NBA.com and the NBA App (across multiple platforms extending from mobile to connected). DTC PTO leads the strategy behind the NBA's direct to consumer programs and offerings including the NBA's membership program (NBA ID) and NBA League Pass.

Job Summary:
As a Senior AI Engineer, you will be involved in all aspects of delivering consumer-facing Artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions, including experimentation, conceptualization, prototyping, prompting, LLM Ops, measuring quality and performance and collaborating with development teams to integrate and deploy solutions to production.

Major Responsibilities: 

• Implement AI-driven features and improve existing AI capabilities.
• Design scalable and efficient AI architectures that leverage distributed computing, cloud services, and big data infrastructure.
• Design and develop effective prompts to interact with LLMs.
• Test and refine prompts based on model responses and specific use cases, ensuring outputs drive a useful and engaging experience for basketball fans.
• Supervise and evaluate AI outputs to ensure accuracy, relevance, and alignment with business goals.
• Rapidly develop and iterate on AI proofs-of-concept to test new ideas and hypotheses to efficiently validate and evolve our AI initiatives.
• Stay current with the latest AI advancements, research, and industry trends, proactively identifying implications for the NBA's AI products.
• Document methodologies, implementation details and project details to share with internal and external stakeholders.
• Solve complex technical challenges related to creating low latency, large-scale systems in a consumer-facing environment.
• Collaborate closely with engineering, product, design and content teams to translate business requirements into solutions.
• Collaborate with our skilled software engineers to seamlessly integrate AI-powered capabilities into production systems, ensuring scalability and efficiency.
• Collaborate with DevOps and infrastructure teams for seamless integration.
• Write end-to-end automated tests for all layers of software.

Required Education/Professional Experience

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent work experience
• 6+ years of software engineering experience, with a demonstrated ability to thrive in ambiguous and rapidly-changing environments
• 4+ years of experience in developing AI solutions in production settings
• Recent experience developing generative AI solutions

Required Skills/Knowledge Attributes

• Knowledge of generative AI models (e.g., GPT-4o, Gemini 1.5, Claude-3.5 Sonnet, LLama)
• Hands on experience building production grade RAG systems and applying agentic patterns to build copilot/assistant-type agents
• Ability to apply your AI knowledge with a product-oriented focus.
• Demonstratable passion for developing generative AI-powered products whether that is through work experience or projects you have worked on in your own time
• Experience with cloud infrastructure (e.g., Azure, AWS, GCP) and the full end-to-end process of modern software deployment (e.g., containerization, Kubernetes, CI/CD pipelines, building APIs, deploying infrastructure, interacting with databases)
• Deep basketball domain knowledge/understanding of the game to be able to inform product decisions and rapidly assess the correctness and quality of AI-generated outputs (inclusive of content).
• Passion for basketball and an interest in building products for fans using NBA data sources!
• Ability to evaluate external software for decision-making on buying or building.
• Exceptional collaboration and communication skills to effectively engage and work alongside stakeholders from diverse disciplines with varying levels of technical expertise!

Salary Range: $150,000 - $210,000 

We Consider Applicants For All Positions On The Basis Of Merit, Qualifications And Business Needs, And Without Regard To Race, Color, National Origin, Religion, Sex, Gender Identity, Age, Disability, Alienage Or Citizenship Status, Ancestry, Marital Status, Creed, Genetic Predisposition Or Carrier Status, Sexual Orientation, Veteran Status, Familial Status, Status As A Victim Of Domestic Violence Or Any Other Status Or Characteristic Protected By Applicable Federal, State, Or Local Law.