Senior Machine Learning Engineer (contract)

UnderwriteMe Ltd; London; On-site; GBP 125,000 - 150,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading insurtech company, dedicated to making life insurance more accessible, is seeking a Senior Machine Learning Engineer. This role focuses on designing and deploying state-of-the-art NLP systems within a fast-paced environment. If you're skilled in LLMs and thrive on innovation, this opportunity offers a dynamic team setting with a strong commitment to technology-driven solutions.

Qualifications

• 6+ years in machine learning with deep NLP expertise.
• Strong knowledge of LLMs and experience with frameworks like Hugging Face and OpenAI API.
• Proven skills in prompt engineering and RAG.

Responsibilities

• Design, experiment, and deploy NLP and LLM models.
• Collaborate with teams to align ML capabilities with product goals.
• Drive rapid experimentation and maintain a learning-oriented mindset.

Skills

Python

NLP

Tools

PyTorch

TensorFlow

AWS

Docker

Kubernetes

Job description

Job Title
Senior Machine Learning Engineer (contract)

Job Description

This is a day rate contract for a 6 month period

UnderwriteMe is a UK based Insurtech creating disruptive SaaS solutions for the insurance industry. We are on a mission to make life insurance more widely accessible, providing technology to ensure people and their loved ones are protected when the inevitable happens.

Team
We are a fast-growing team within UnderwriteMe that is building cutting-edge AI solutions for the underwriting and insurance industry. If you have an entrepreneurial spirit, thrive in a fast-paced environment, and want to help us disrupt the industry with innovative AI products, we want you on our team.

About The Role
As a Senior Machine Learning Engineer, you'll take ownership of designing, building, and deploying advanced NLP systems and LLMs. You'll experiment, iterate, and build quickly, working alongside a cross-functional team in a dynamic, fast-fail environment. Your work will have a direct impact on our product and business as we push the boundaries of what's possible with AI

What you will be Doing

• Build & Iterate Fast: Design, experiment, and deploy state-of-the-art NLP and LLM models. Quickly test hypotheses, optimise, and iterate based on real-world feedback.

• Lead Innovation: Push the envelope with cutting-edge NLP techniques and models (transformers, GPT, BERT, etc.) to solve challenging problems in language understanding, generation, extraction, and more.

• Shape the Product: Collaborate with engineers, product teams, and business leaders to align machine learning capabilities with product goals.

• Fail Fast, Learn Fast: Drive rapid experimentation and maintain a learning-oriented mindset to pivot quickly when necessary.

• Scale and Optimise: Take models from prototypes to production, optimising for performance, scalability, and efficiency.

What type of person fits the role:

• Experience: 6+ years in machine learning, with deep expertise in NLP and LLMs/SLMs

• LLMs: Strong knowledge of large language models (LLMs) and experience with frameworks and libraries like Hugging Face, OpenAI API, LangChain, DeepSpeed, LlamaIndex, LiteLLM, vLLM, etc. Experience in model deployment and optimisation for inference speed and scalability is a plus.

• Prompt Engineering: Proven ability to design and optimise prompts for LLMs, including techniques like few-shot, zero-shot, chain-of-thought, and prompt tuning.

• RAG: Hands-on experience with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to improve model performance in tasks such as question answering and document retrieval.

• Skills: Strong Python skills, experience with cloud ML platforms (AWS preferred), and ML frameworks (PyTorch, TensorFlow). Familiarity with Docker and Kubernetes for containerisation and deployment.

• Mindset: Entrepreneurial attitude with a "Build Fast, Fail Fast" approach, thriving in agile, iterative environments.

#LI-contract

About UnderwriteMe

UnderwriteMe is an Insurtech software business and subsidiary of Pacific Life Re (PL Re), a global life and pensions reinsurance firm. We have a vision to help everyone purchase protection insurance by using data and disruptive technology to transform our partners and markets in order to make their underwriting processes as quick and efficient as possible.

Our core products are:
• a best-in-market Underwriting Rules Engine which can be used to automate any structured data within the underwriting journey, and which is sold in the UK & Ireland, Asia-Pacific and North America
• the Protection Platform, an end-to-end quote and buy marketplace for Protection in the UK

Working for UnderwriteMe

Joining UnderwriteMe means being part of a technology company that is committed to bringing a fresh and dynamic approach to insurance. You'd be working with a team of highly technical experts made up of people with backgrounds in software, fintech, and insurance. Every person in our global team is valued for the unique qualities they bring to our business and we seek to build their expertise and support their individual ambitions at every step.

Of course, we take our work seriously and we know our team can operate under great pressure. We work hard and thrive on achievement, but we also know how to have fun and relax too. We regularly host a range of team building days to strengthen our team's connection with each other and reflect on their successes.

Providing employees with a healthy work-life balance is very important to our culture. We have a wide range of employee benefits and we host regular social activities and wellbeing initiatives. We are also committed to supporting our employee's involvement in their communities, by actively fundraising, hosting charity events, and overseeing volunteering opportunities.

Benefits (Only for Permanent and Fixed Term Employees)

• Stakeholder Pension Scheme
• Life Assurance
• Subsidised Gym Membership
• Private Medical Insurance
• Season Ticket Loan
• Eye Care
• Employee Assistance Programme
• Group Income Protection
• Wellness Benefits

As part of our commitment to accessibility for all, UnderwriteMe will, upon the request of the applicant, provide accommodation during the recruitment process to ensure equal access to applicants with disabilities. Please contact us about your needs, and we will consult with you to ensure suitable accommodation is provided.

UnderwriteMe Values

Please click here to view our company values