Machine Learning Engineer / Researcher

Overview

Research-focused Machine Learning Engineer role adapting small language models (SLMs) to specialized, high-value domain applications within a research initiative at a management consulting and technology firm.

What you'll do

• Own the end-to-end adaptation of SLMs to specialized domain tasks, choosing the right base models, training strategies, and architectures.
• Implement parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods, with a mathematically grounded understanding of low-rank adaptation (LoRA, QLoRA, rank selection, parameterization, scaling, and accuracy–efficiency trade-offs).
• Determine and sequence optimal adaptation strategies, including Continued Pre-Training (CPT), Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), and RL/preference tuning (DPO, GRPO, RLHF).
• Clean, curate, format, and generate high-quality datasets, including synthetic data generation when domain data is scarce.
• Build task-specific benchmarks grounded in functional, executable correctness rather than loss curves or perplexity alone, maintaining regression tracking across versions.
• Use larger models as teachers to transfer capabilities to SLMs via distillation, structured pruning, and quantization.
• Stand up and optimize inference infrastructure across GPU, CPU, and edge targets using frameworks such as vLLM, TGI, Ollama, llama.cpp, or TensorRT-LLM.
• Break target tasks into milestones with clear criteria, maintaining reproducible pipelines with data/config versioning, checkpointing, and experiment tracking.
• Translate recent literature into reproducible experiments.

What you'll need

• 3+ years in Machine Learning Engineering or Applied ML, with hands-on experience fine-tuning transformer-based language models.
• Advanced Python and PyTorch proficiency.
• Deep fluency in the Hugging Face ecosystem, including Transformers, PEFT, Datasets, Accelerate, and TRL.
• Practical command of SFT with LoRA/QLoRA, alongside the judgment to reason about CPT and RL/preference methods.
• Strong understanding of base model architectures, tokenizer design, pre-training data distributions, licensing, and context window requirements.
• Proven experience building training pipelines (curation, cleaning, synthetic data generation, and formatting).
• Ability to design executable correctness evaluations, paired with hands-on experience serving and quantizing models using at least one modern inference framework.
• Comfort reading recent ML research papers and translating state-of-the-art methods into working code.

Nice to have

• Hands-on experience with Continued Pre-Training (CPT) on large domain corpora.
• Experience with Reinforcement Learning / preference optimization for LLMs (reward modeling, DPO, GRPO, or verifiable-reward setups).
• Experience with structured-output generation, code generation (e.g., SQL/DDL), or domain classification fine-tuning.
• Familiarity with distributed training frameworks (DeepSpeed, FSDP).
• Knowledge distillation experience transferring capabilities from large teacher models to small student models.
• Experience with on-device or edge deployment.
• Active open-source contributions to machine learning tooling, libraries, or published models.

Details

• Locations: Bengaluru, Karnataka, India; Pune, Maharashtra, India.
• Employment-based cooperation.
• Flexible hours and work setup.