Job Description:

This person will serve at the intersection of technical excellence and client partnership: delivering AI-powered solutions, helping clients understand what's possible, and shaping how our practice evolves as technology does.

Client Engagement & Consulting

• Partner with clients to understand their business processes, pain points, and strategic goals — translating those into actionable AI solution designs.
• Support  discovery sessions, workshops, and working sessions with stakeholders at varying levels of technical fluency.
• Communicate AI capabilities and limitations clearly, helping clients set realistic expectations and build confidence in new approaches.
• Become a trusted advisor — not just a vendor — for the clients you work with.

Solution Design & Development

• Build and deploy AI solutions across internal tooling and client-facing projects, from MVPs to production-grade systems.
• Architect and implement agentic workflows — designing systems where AI models reason, plan, and act autonomously or semi-autonomously across multi-step tasks.
• Identify opportunities to augment or replace manual processes with intelligent automation, including LLM pipelines, RAG systems, tool-use agents, and orchestration layers.
• Iterate on existing solutions based on usage data, client feedback, and the evolving capabilities of the underlying models.

Forward-Looking Practice Development

• Stay at the leading edge of AI research and tooling — evaluating new models, frameworks, and paradigms as they emerge, in compliance with Merkle standards.
• Translate emerging capabilities into concrete recommendations for clients and internal teams: what's ready now, what's worth watching, and what's overhyped.
• Contribute to internal knowledge-sharing, documentation, and the development of reusable patterns and accelerators.

Technical Skills

• Proficiency in Python and experience building with LLM APIs (OpenAI, Anthropic, etc.)
• Hands-on experience with agentic frameworks
• Comfort working across the full development lifecycle: scoping, building, testing, deploying, and iterating
• Working knowledge of cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and modern deployment practices

Consulting & Communication Skills

• Ability to present ideas clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences
• Strong written communication
• Comfortable with ambiguity: you can structure a fuzzy problem, propose a direction, and build toward it
• Client empathy — you listen before you prescribe and know when to push back constructively

Mindset

• Curiosity-driven: you follow what's new in AI not because you have to, but because you genuinely want to know
• Ownership mentality: you treat client problems like your own and see things through
• Collaborative: you make the people around you better and enjoy figuring things out as a team
• Adaptable: you're comfortable operating at different altitudes — strategic thinking one day, hands-on debugging the next

At dentsu, we believe great work happens when we’re connected. Our hybrid way of working combines remote flexibility with regular in-person collaboration to spark ideas and strengthen our teams. Many of our employees who live within commuting distance (90 minutes) from one of our Headquarter or Hub Offices (New York, Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles) are required to work in the office 2-3 days per week including one Team Day. The minimum number of days may vary by office and role. Dentsu may designate other HQ or Hub offices at any time. Those who do not live near an office may be designated as a remote employee, depending on the role and business needs. Regardless of your work location, we expect you to be flexible to meet the needs of our Company and clients, which may include attendance in an office from time to time.

The annual salary range for this position is $51,000 - $83,088. Placement within the salary range is based on a variety of factors, including relevant experience, knowledge, skills, and other factors permitted by law.

Benefits available with this position include:

• Medical, vision, and dental insurance,
• Life insurance,
• Short-term and long-term disability insurance,
• 401k,
• Flexible paid time off,
• At least 15 paid holidays per year,
• Paid sick and safe leave, and
• Paid parental leave.

Dentsu also complies with applicable state and local laws regarding employee leave benefits, including, but not limited to providing time off pursuant to the Colorado Healthy Families and Workplaces Act, in accordance with its plans and policies. For further details regarding Dentsu benefits, please visit www.dentsubenefitsplus.com.

#LI-hybrid #LI-JH2 #LI-remote

Location:

Chicago

Brand:

Merkle

Time Type:

Full time

Contract Type:

Permanent