About the Role
The Senior Machine Learning Engineer will take full ownership of features throughout the product lifecycle—from requirements definition to production deployment. This onsite role requires an entrepreneurial mindset and deep technical execution to turn loosely defined problems into robust, production-ready machine learning and LLM-based systems without reliance on large engineering teams or dedicated project managers.
Responsibilities
- Own Applied ML End-to-End: Translate ambiguous, high-level business problems into datasets, experiments, models, and production systems independently.
- Build Production Pipelines: Develop and maintain production Python systems for data collection, enrichment, feature extraction, scoring, model evaluation, and AI-assisted research workflows.
- Model Design & Evaluation: Define labels and features, construct evaluation sets and backtests, detect data leakage, evaluate source quality, and select optimal modeling approaches (including traditional ML and LLMs).
- Production Deployment & Operations: Transition models from research to production environments, managing artifacts, feature/prompt compatibility, APIs, background jobs, observability, failure handling, and release cycles.
- Enhance LLM Infrastructure: Improve large language model systems, including structured data extraction, research agents, prompt and model evaluation, and safety guardrails for untrusted external inputs.
- Stakeholder Collaboration: Work directly with key stakeholders to determine roadmap priorities, clearly articulate model behavior and tradeoffs, and iterate iteratively based on real-world usage.
Requirements
- Senior-Level ML Expertise: Proven ability to drive complex, ambiguous ML problems from initial experimentation through to reliable production releases.
- Production Python Proficiency: Strong mastery of Python across data exploration, training pipelines, application logic, APIs, and production debugging.
- Robust Modeling Judgment: Deep experience in problem formulation, label definition, feature engineering, evaluation metrics, backtesting, data leakage prevention, calibration, interpretability, and model selection.
- Full-Stack ML Engineering Capability: Strong software engineering and data pipeline fundamentals to deploy, integrate, schema-manage, and monitor services autonomously.
- Applied LLM Systems Experience: Hands-on experience with structured outputs, model/prompt evaluation frameworks, observability, retry strategies, cost/latency optimization, and input validation.
- Product Sense & Communication: Ability to communicate technical tradeoffs clearly with non-technical stakeholders and translate model outputs into actionable business tools.
- Based in or willing to relocate to New York City (onsite presence is strictly required).
- Track record of shipping customer-facing ML products with end-to-end ownership.
- Strong portfolio of technical work (e.g., active GitHub, open-source contributions, published research, or technical writing).
- Prior experience developing prediction, ranking, classification, recommendation, or anomaly-detection systems on messy, real-world data.
- Background building LLM evaluation frameworks, structured extraction pipelines, or automated research agents.
- Early-stage startup experience as a founder, early ML hire, or senior IC working without dedicated platform teams.
- Exceptional technical or quantitative pedigree (e.g., strong research background, competition achievements, or top-tier academic background in quantitative disciplines).
- Direct partnership with high-impact founders across emerging technology sectors.
Skills
- Machine Learning
- LLMs
- Python
- Data Pipelines
- Model Deployment
- Model Evaluation
- LLM Infrastructure
- Structured Data Extraction
- Research Agents
- Prompt Evaluation
- Model Evaluation
- Safety Guardrails
- Prediction Systems
- Ranking Systems
- Classification Systems
- Recommendation Systems
- Anomaly Detection Systems
Location
- New York, United States (Office)
- New York City
Work Type
- On-Site
- Full-time
Experience Level
- Senior-Level
- Senior
Education Level
- Exceptional technical or quantitative pedigree (e.g., strong research background, competition achievements, or top-tier academic background in quantitative disciplines).
Salary/Compensations
- $300K - $375K
Benefits
- Competitive compensation and benefits package.
- Accelerated career growth and networking opportunities within a leading startup ecosystem.
About the Company
- Our client, a venture accelerator backing high-growth technology and emerging-tech startups.
- High-trust, high-autonomy environment within a lean, elite engineering team composed of industry veterans.
- Direct ownership over core systems shaping founder discovery and operational workflows.
Equal Opportunity
- At MLabs, we are committed to offer equal opportunities to all candidates. We ensure no discrimination, accessible job adverts, and providing information in accessible formats. Our goal is to foster a diverse, inclusive workplace with equal opportunities for all. If you need any reasonable adjustments during any part of the hiring process or you would like to see the job-advert in an accessible format please let us know at the earliest opportunity by emailing human-resources@mlabs.city.
- MLabs Ltd collects and processes the personal information you provide such as your contact details, work history, resume, and other relevant data for recruitment purposes only. This information is managed securely in accordance with MLabs Ltd’s Privacy Policy and Information Security Policy, and in compliance with applicable data protection laws. Your data may be shared only with clients and trusted partners where necessary for recruitment purposes. You may request the deletion of your data or withdraw your consent at any time by contacting legal@mlabs.city.
