Senior Machine Learning Engineer

• Collaborate in raising the technology readiness level of proofs-of-concept, developing exploratory notebooks and scripts first into prototypes and then to repeatable, performant, future-ready deployments. 
• Design and build robust model training, inference and monitoring MLOps pipelines, both locally and in the cloud. 
• Advise on system, data and model architecture in early-stage opportunity scoping. 
• Ensure models are appropriate for, and proportionate to, their intended purposes, while mitigating pitfalls such as overfitting and bias. 
• Advance internal and industry practices in model trustworthiness through confidence quantification and explainability or interpretability, where appropriate. 
• Work on multiple projects simultaneously as a key member of engineering staff. 
• Technical leadership of projects and project teams, ensuring excellent technical quality, staff and customer satisfaction. 
• Coaching and development of technical staff to support company-wide capability growth in ML engineering. 
• Stay abreast of relevant tools and techniques in data-driven modelling. 
• Contribute to the wider design and development of mathematical and statistical models. 
• Be an expert voice in wider company processes and policies around AI and ML. 
• Representing the company at externally facing events. 

Necessary qualifications, skills and experience: 

• Bachelor’s degree in a scientific or engineering discipline, with master’s or doctoral-level study preferred 
• At least three years of professional experience in ML engineering or a related domain 
• Expert Python programmer 
• Linux and Windows environments 
• Version control via Git 
• Unit and integration testing 
• Cloud platforms and data services 
• Relational databases and SQL 
• Data feature engineering 
• Building and deploying model endpoints 
• Teamwork, multi-tasking, and distributed working 
• Demonstrable leadership experience, through technical leadership, project management and/or line management, including the development of colleagues to support their growth and project delivery. 

Experience in some but not all of the following would also be expected:

• Other programming languages (particularly R) 
• Professional software engineering 
• Data ETL pipeline engineering 
• DevOps processes, including CI/CD 
• Containerisation 
• Web development, especially front-end frameworks (such as React) 
• Dashboarding systems (such as PowerBI) 
• Distributed processing of big data 
• NoSQL databases and data modelling techniques, such as knowledge graphs 
• API design, implementation and deployment 

• Flexible working for all – work your contracted hours at times that best suit you and our customers, at home, in the office or as a mixture of both 
• Health and well-being support – Smith Institute provides up to three months’ contractual sick pay, have qualified Mental Health First Aiders, a Mindful Employer Plus membership and offer additional leave allowance to care for close family members 
• Social events – most months our Social Committee organise events and we also have ongoing activities, including pub socials, a book club, a fantasy football league and a board games library 
• Employee benefits – employee discount platform and Employee assistance programme 
• Enhanced leave – bereavement, dependency, maternity, paternity & shared parental leave 
• Mentoring – from colleagues and leading academics 
• Generous pension scheme with Life Assurance and income protection 
• All IT equipment provided and maintained 
• Interesting and challenging work with purpose 

We operate an Equal Opportunities Policy. We currently have a rolling recruitment programme so applications will be reviewed as they are received, with a view to interviewing selected candidates when sufficient numbers are shortlisted. We hope to make appointments as soon as possible thereafter.