Senior Applied Data Scientist — ML, NLP & LLMs

Applaudo; Medellín; On-site; COP 90,000,000 - 150,000,000; Full time

Job summary

Applaudo is seeking an experienced Data Scientist with strong applied ML expertise to build and evaluate models on large, messy data. You will design experiments, work with embeddings, semantic similarity, LLMs, NLP, and both supervised and unsupervised learning to drive real business impact.

The role requires autonomy, rigorous experimentation, and the ability to communicate trade-offs to technical and non-technical stakeholders. Join a team that values scalable, cost-aware ML solutions.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of professional Data Science / Machine Learning experience.
• Strong applied ML fundamentals with real-world data.
• Excellent Python and SQL skills.
• Hands-on experience with embeddings and semantic similarity.
• Practical experience applying LLMs to real-world problems.
• Experience with supervised and unsupervised learning.
• Strong experience with classification and NLP.
• Knowledge of neural networks and transformers.
• Hands-on with ML frameworks: TensorFlow, PyTorch, PyCaret.
• Experience retraining or maintaining production models.
• Strong experimental design and model evaluation skills.

Responsibilities

• Build and evaluate ML approaches for company/entity matching.
• Develop embedding and LLM-based matching approaches.
• Develop scoring and ranking methodologies to identify true matches.
• Work with messy data including multilingual records and firmographics.
• Define benchmark datasets, metrics, baselines, and error-analysis processes.
• Design and execute experiments to validate hypotheses.
• Compare LLM-assisted approaches against lower-cost alternatives.
• Analyze model behavior, edge cases, and trade-offs.
• Consider inference economics and scalability from the start.
• Communicate experimental findings to engineers and business stakeholders.
• Independently establish experimental pipelines and research approaches.
• Document both successful and unsuccessful experiments.

Skills

Data Science

Machine Learning

Python

SQL

Embeddings

NLP

LLMs

Model Evaluation

Experiment Design

Inference Cost & Scalability

Tools

TensorFlow

PyTorch

PyCaret

Spark

Snowflake

Databricks

BigQuery

Job description

Applaudo is seeking an experienced Data Scientist with strong applied ML expertise to build and evaluate models on large, messy data. You will design experiments, work with embeddings, semantic similarity, LLMs, NLP, and both supervised and unsupervised learning to drive real business impact.

The role requires autonomy, rigorous experimentation, and the ability to communicate trade-offs to technical and non-technical stakeholders. Join a team that values scalable, cost-aware ML solutions.