Machine Learning Engineer | Contract | Remote

Overview

Hands-on Machine Learning Engineer on a project-based contract to help build an AI-powered risk intelligence platform that detects, assesses and responds to online threats such as disinformation, reputational attacks and security risks.

What you'll do

• Design, train and deploy ML models for text classification, entity extraction, clustering, and narrative and topic detection
• Build and improve LLM-powered features, including prompt design, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and agentic workflows
• Develop embedding and semantic-search pipelines to group related content and surface emerging threats
• Productionize models as scalable, monitored services with clear latency, cost, and accuracy targets
• Build evaluation frameworks and datasets to measure model quality, bias, and drift over time
• Work with data engineering to improve ingestion, labeling, and feature pipelines for high-volume, noisy, multilingual text data
• Monitor and retrain models in production, and debug quality issues end to end
• Document approaches and share trade-offs clearly with technical and non-technical stakeholders

What you'll need

• 4+ years of professional experience building and deploying machine learning models in production
• Strong Python skills and hands-on experience with PyTorch, TensorFlow, or Hugging Face Transformers
• Practical NLP experience, such as classification, named entity recognition (NER), topic modeling, or semantic similarity on real-world text data
• Hands-on experience building with LLMs (OpenAI, Anthropic, or open-source models), including prompt engineering and RAG
• Experience with embeddings and vector search (e.g., pgvector, Pinecone, OpenSearch, or FAISS)
• Experience deploying and operating ML services on AWS, GCP, or Azure, using Docker and CI/CD
• Solid grasp of model evaluation, including metrics, test sets, error analysis, and production monitoring
• Strong communication skills and comfort working in a remote, cross-functional team

Nice to have

• Experience with trust and safety, threat intelligence, disinformation research, or social media data
• Experience building agentic AI systems or tool-using LLM workflows (e.g., LangChain, LlamaIndex, or custom frameworks)
• Experience with multilingual NLP
• Familiarity with MLOps tooling such as MLflow, SageMaker, Vertex AI, or Weights & Biases
• Experience with streaming or large-scale data processing (e.g., Kafka, Spark, or Airflow)
• Experience fine-tuning LLMs (LoRA or PEFT) or distilling models to cut cost and latency

Details

• Location: Remote, USA
• Must work overlapping hours with US Eastern Time
• Employment type: Contract
• Applicants must be authorized to work for any employer in the U.S.; visa sponsorship is not available