Machine Learning Lead

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in Serbia, +1 more country.

📋 Description

• Take ownership of the machine learning strategy for dialogue systems, aligning priorities with business metrics such as ARPU, retention, and chat depth.

• Manage a team of 3 ML engineers; establish technical standards, allocate tasks, recruit and release personnel, and support team development.

• Oversee the end-to-end process of LLM post-training and model adaptation, which includes SFT, LoRA/QLoRA, preference optimization, and dataset creation.

• Design agent harnesses and tool-utilizing LLM systems, encompassing tool invocation, structured outputs, routing, retries, memory and context management, and guardrails.

• Develop the evaluation framework featuring offline and pairwise evaluations, LLM-as-a-judge, and regression suites that correlate with A/B testing results.

• Mitigate dialogue failure modes such as loops, contradictions, persona drift, context loss, and generic responses.

• Ensure inference remains efficient in terms of latency and cost per message.

• Allocate about 10–20% of your time to prototyping, debugging agent traces, and reviewing the work of the team.

⛳️ Requirements

• Hold a technical degree and possess a substantial background in ML engineering, having personally trained and deployed models.

• Proven experience in leading a team of 3–5 ML engineers, including responsibilities for hiring and performance evaluations.

• Proficient in Python at an expert level.

• Strong understanding of transformer architecture and the behavior of modern LLMs.

• Practical experience in training, fine-tuning, and evaluating models.

• Production experience with LLM systems, including APIs, streaming, batching, fallbacks, cost/latenct trade-offs, and trace observability.

• Ability to interpret recent research and translate it into prototypes, evaluations, and deployable changes with measurable impacts.

• Fluent in Russian.

• Open to working within CET (±2) hours.

• Nice to have: experience extending beyond text, managing long-running conversations and ensuring character consistency, familiarity with vLLM / TGI / SGLang, DeepSpeed / FSDP / Accelerate, quantization, and safety classifiers.

🏝️ Benefits

• REMOTE OPPORTUNITY for full-time work.

• 28 calendar days of vacation per year.

• 7 wellness days per year (time off).

• Bonuses up to $5000 for successfully recommending applicants for company positions.

• 50% reimbursement for professional training, international conferences, and meetings.

• Corporate discounts for English lessons.

• Health benefits: up to $1,000 gross reimbursement per year for self-purchased health insurance or doctor’s fees if corporate medical insurance is not available.

• Fully equipped workplace and necessary equipment available in offices or co-working spaces.

• Reimbursement of workplace costs up to $1000 gross every 3 years for co-working or home-office setups.

• An internal gamified gratitude system allowing bonuses to be exchanged for merchandise, team-building activities, massage certificates, etc.