I had a small engagement with someone in this area last year. He essentially provides consulting on ML based trading. One man band, $200-300K annually. Not quite sure who the end clients were thought..
I mean, he's just an AI/ML consultant. Is he also the one coming up the financial logic? At this point it's basically Finance PhDs coming up with the ideas and then the AI consultants are building the system. If he was coming up with the ideas, then $300k is extremely underpaid.