Senior Machine Learning Engineer

Years from now, history will look back at this moment as a landmark for the human race, the moment generative AI began to change everything. At Loka, we're not just watching it happen, we're building it. Our teams have helped develop novel drugs for fighting cancer, and our ML crew is doing similarly high-stakes work across life sciences, from cutting-edge BioLM models to agentic applications for genetic research companies.

Loka is seeking a Senior Machine Learning Engineer to join our growing team. In this position you'll serve as the primary specialist in designing and implementing machine learning solutions across multiple projects. Your expertise in GenAI, ML and DL will empower us to develop robust, scalable systems and improve them over time. Ultimately we expect you to not just fit in with our ML crew but to elevate it to new heights.

About Loka

Loka is a globally distributed tech consultancy based in Silicon Valley. In 2024, we were recognized by AWS as Innovation Partner of the Year, beating out 150,000 partners for the title.

We count more than 100 certified specialists, technical experts and PhDs among our teammates, committed Lokals who bring their brilliance both to client work and to mentoring junior colleagues. We work entirely remotely, test new ideas in our in-house incubator LokaLabs™, observe local holidays and take every other Friday off (really).

What You'll Do

Project Work & Logistics

• Take full responsibility for assigned tasks and projects, ensuring accountability for outcomes and results.
• Lead client communications, gathering requirements, managing expectations and communicating deliverables effectively.
• Understand business objectives and build solutions that help achieve them, along with metrics to track progress.
• Collaborate cross functionally with other teams (Data Engineering, DevOps, Backend) to ensure seamless integration of ML solutions.

Technical Tasks

• Design, build, and maintain generative AI systems end to end, developing LLM powered applications and agentic workflows, implementing RAG pipelines (data ingestion, chunking, embeddings, vector search).
• Establish evaluation frameworks and production monitoring on your GenAI solutions to continuously measure output quality, accuracy, latency, cost, and reliability while iterating on prompts, models, and architecture.
• Wrangle, explore and visualize data with a keen eye for data cleaning, as well as differences in data distribution that may affect post deployment performance.
• Deploy, maintain and upgrade ML models and pipelines.
• Analyze model errors and design strategies to overcome them.
• Write and maintain technical documentation.
• Drive architectural decisions and contribute to high level planning and strategy.
• Continuously optimize solutions for performance, scalability and cost effectiveness, especially within the AWS environment.

Misson Support

• Engage with clients to understand their business and technical needs, evaluate potential solutions, and define high-level implementation approaches and estimates.
• Contribute to internal engineering initiatives and projects, helping identify opportunities for improvement and drive their implementation.

Mentoring & Leadership

• Serve as the primary ML specialist across multiple projects, elevating the team's work.
• Provide guidance and mentorship to junior ML engineers within the team.

What You'll Bring

Technical Skills

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related field.
• 4+ years of AI/ML engineering experience.
• Proven experience building GenAI solutions, prompt engineering, fine-tuning and serving LLMs, search and embeddings, and developing agents with common patterns (Agentic RAG, NLQ), using frameworks such as LangChain/LangGraph, LlamaIndex, smolagents and strands-agents.
• Understanding of statistical, ML and deep learning algorithms.
• Solid experience with cloud ML services, preferably AWS (Bedrock, AgentCore, SageMaker).
• Experience with containerization and orchestration tools.
• Client-facing experience.
• Deep proficiency in Python and core ML libraries and frameworks (scikit-learn, PyTorch, HuggingFace, TensorFlow, Transformers).

Leadership & Soft Skills

• A track record of mentoring junior engineers and elevating team output.
• Confidence leading client communications and managing expectations independently.
• Autonomy, adaptability and a consistently positive presence on the teams you work with.

Not Required but Nice to Have

• MLOps/LLMOps experience, preferably in AWS, along with standard tooling (MLFlow, LangFuse).
• Experience in consultancy environments or startups, including managing projects and adapting to different settings.

Additional Requirements

• Excellent English, as a global team, we work entirely in English for meetings, customer calls and business communications.
• CV written in English.

Personality Profile

• Curious: You strive to learn and grow into different industries with a modern tech stack.
• Autonomous and positive: You excel in a fully remote, globally distributed team.
• Team player: You enjoy a collaborative approach.
• Adaptable: You operate with a startup mindset and move at a startup pace.
• Empathetic: You lead and mentor with patience and compassion.

Benefits

• Every other Friday off (26 extra days off a year)
• Remote-first culture
• Explore and Relocation programs (three months work abroad or full international relo)
• Paid sick days and local holidays
• Business English classes program
• Continuous Learning Support
• Fitness and/or Mental Health Subscriptions
• Access to LokaLabs™, our internal research and development program
• Defined career path

Your achievements matter to us! Ensure your CV, LinkedIn and GitHub profiles are up to date and accurately reflect your experience.