Staff ML Engineer-Prague

VERSANT (Nasdaq: VSNT) is an industry-changing media and entertainment business and home to trusted brands that shape culture, inform audiences, and build lasting connections. It operates across four core markets: political news and opinion, business news and personal finance, golf, and sports and genre entertainment. These markets are served through a powerful portfolio of iconic and innovative brands, including CNBC, MS NOW, USA Network, Golf Channel, Oxygen, E!, SYFY, and Versant's sports division USA Sports, along with complementary digital assets including Fandango, Rotten Tomatoes, GolfNow and GolfPass.

StockStory, now part of CNBC under VERSANT, is building the next generation of AI-powered equity research for individual investors. This is a chance to build products that can shape how millions of consumers understand markets and make investing decisions.

We offer the best parts of a startup environment - small team, high ownership, fast execution, and room to experiment - with the backing and stability of VERSANT, an independent publicly traded media company.

Staff ML Engineer

We're looking for a Staff ML Engineer to lead the design and delivery of large-scale, production AI systems that power core products. A genuine interest in investing, public markets, and fundamental business analysis is expected.

This role is for someone who combines deep machine learning expertise with strong software engineering and architectural judgment, and who is excited to solve ambiguous, high-leverage problems that shape both product capabilities and technical direction. You will work across teams to ensure our AI systems are reliable, scalable, and aligned with long-term product and infrastructure goals.

You will be joining a team of exceptional engineers, analysts, and investors working at the intersection of AI and public markets. A particularly rare part of this role is the level of direct access to experienced market professionals, including former hedge fund managers and top-tier analysts, whose insights can directly inform how you think about modeling, signals, and product design. For an ambitious AI engineer, it is an unusual opportunity to work with cutting-edge technology and advanced data systems while learning firsthand how sophisticated investors analyze businesses and markets.

You will design and operate end-to-end ML systems spanning data pipelines, training workflows, inference services, evaluation, and monitoring, while helping define how AI is applied across the company. This role is especially well suited to engineers who want to pair hands-on technical depth with cross-functional influence and long-term platform thinking.

This role sits within a small and growing, high-caliber team where individuals are expected to operate with a high degree of ownership and autonomy, contributing directly to core product, infrastructure, and modeling decisions while working closely with engineering and senior leadership in a highly collaborative, low-bureaucracy environment with direct access to decision-makers.

What You'll Do:

• Lead the architecture and implementation of production ML and AI systems used at scale
• Drive technical strategy for AI across multiple product areas
• Design end-to-end systems including data pipelines, training workflows, inference services, evaluation, and monitoring
• Own and deliver high-impact projects with significant ambiguity
• Provide technical leadership through design reviews, mentorship, and cross-team collaboration
• Identify and mitigate systemic risks in AI systems, including performance regressions, bias, and operational failure modes
• Guide model lifecycle management, monitoring, and evaluation practices

• Prior experience leading or founding an AI systems team
• Hands-on experience with neural networks, including CNNs, RNNs, Transformers, or other deep learning architectures
• Background in classical and modern NLP techniques such as tokenization, sequence labeling, language modeling, embeddings, text classification, and information extraction
• Experience with large-scale training pipelines using frameworks such as TensorFlow or PyTorch
• Experience building human-in-the-loop training or evaluation workflows

What We're Looking For:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or equivalent practical experience
• 8+ years of experience in software engineering with a focus on machine learning or AI systems
• Experience building and operating production ML systems
• Strong proficiency in Python, TypeScript, or Java
• Proven experience with LLMs, ranking or recommendation systems, search, or applied NLP
• Deep understanding of modern ML techniques, including deep learning and representation learning
• Demonstrated ability to lead technical initiatives across teams
• Ability to proactively share ML knowledge and best practices, fostering a collaborative and non-siloed engineering culture

Disclaimer: Please note that while this role is hosted by Versant, the successful candidate will be employed through a company called “Remote Technology Czech S.R.O”, who is an Employer of Record (EOR). “Remote Technology Czech S.R.O” will be responsible for all local employment matters, including payroll, statutory benefits, and compliance with Czech employment legislation. Day-to-day work, performance expectations, and collaboration will be aligned to Versant’s business and team structure.

As part of our selection process, external candidates may be required to attend an in-person interview with a VERSANT Media employee at one of our locations prior to a hiring decision. VERSANT Media's policy is to provide equal employment opportunities to all applicants and employees without regard to race, color, religion, creed, gender, gender identity or expression, age, national origin or ancestry, citizenship, disability, sexual orientation, marital status, pregnancy, veteran status, membership in the uniformed services, genetic information, or any other basis protected by applicable law.

If you are a qualified individual with a disability or a disabled veteran and require support throughout the application and/or recruitment process as a result of your disability, you have the right to request a reasonable accommodation. You can submit your request to [email protected].

VERSANT Media is not accepting unsolicited assistance from search firms for this employment opportunity. All resumes submitted by search firms to any employee at VERSANT via-email, the Internet, or in any form and/or method without a valid written Statement of Work in place for this position from VERSANT's Talent Acquisition team will be deemed the sole property of VERSANT. No fee will be paid in the event the candidate is hired by VERSANT as a result of the referral or through other means.