Staff Machine Learning Engineer

Altana; Ashington; On-site; GBP 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive base salary

Learning & Development

Health benefits

Paid time off

Equity program

Parental leave

Job summary

Altana seeks a Senior Staff Machine Learning Engineer to lead the AI behind Altana Nexus, our agentic platform for global trade. You’ll own end-to-end ML systems from data ingestion to real-time decisioning across risk, compliance and enforcement for governments and major enterprises.

You’ll architect scalable pipelines, supervise multi-agent workflows, and mentor engineers while shaping product strategy with software, data science, and customers.

Qualifications

• Experience shipping agentic systems in production
• Proven ability to design scalable ML pipelines
• Strong written and verbal communication skills
• Experience with SFT, RLHF/RLAIF, and reward modeling
• Familiarity with safety, guardrails or auditability for AI in regulated domains
• Multilingual NLP and document understanding experience
• Hands-on production LLM applications (RAG, tool calling)
• Experience building multi-agent systems and agent tooling

Responsibilities

• Define architecture and roadmap for models and agentic systems
• Lead the end-to-end data ingestion to decision pipeline for real-time risk and compliance decisions
• Mentor engineers and contribute to hiring and leveling ML talent
• Shape product direction by collaborating with software engineers, data scientists, product managers and customers
• Develop observability, evals, tracing and feedback loops for production ML systems
• Work with LLM tools and frontier model APIs to balance cost, latency, and accuracy

Skills

Agentic systems

Strong communication

RLHF/RLAIF experience

Multi-agent workflows

Multilingual NLP

AI safety

Education

BS/MS in CS/ML or related field

Tools

Python

Spark

PyTorch

Hugging Face

MLflow

Databricks Mosaic AI

LangGraph

LangSmith/Braintrust

vLLM

FAISS

OpenSearch

Docker

Kubernetes

AWS

Azure

Job description

• We’re looking for a Senior Staff Machine Learning Engineer to lead the AI behind Altana Nexus, our agentic platform for global trade. You’ll work on a continuous stream of public and proprietary trade data (shipments, customs filings, trade documents), and build the models and AI agents that turn it into real-time decisions on risk, compliance and enforcement for governments and the world’s largest companies
• Drive the technical direction for agentic systems. Define the architecture and roadmap for the models and agentic systems that process trade data as it arrives (shipments, customs declarations, invoices, bills of lading) and turn it into risk, classification and compliance decisions in real time
• Build the pipeline from ingestion to decision. Lead the design of reliable, cost-efficient systems for ingestion, document understanding, entity resolution, inference and routing across models, at the scale of global trade
• Adapt models to trade. Use analyst feedback, production outcomes and agent traces to fine-tune and post-train models (SFT, DPO, RL with domain graders) where it measurably beats prompting, and keep every model improving over time
• Design the observability and feedback stack. Build the evals, tracing and feedback loops that decide what ships and catch regressions in production
• Lead beyond your team. Mentor senior engineers, raise the technical bar across Engineering, and help shape how we hire and level ML talent
• Shape the product and the business. Work with software engineers, data scientists, product managers and customers to generate new business ideas and turn ambiguous problems into shipped capabilities
• Technologies we love
• Languages: Python, Spark
• Tools: Docker, Git, Kubernetes, Swagger/OpenAPI, AWS, Azure
• Datastores: Databricks, OpenSearch, Postgres
• ML Tools: PyTorch, Hugging Face, FAISS, MLflow
• LLM Tools: vLLM, LangGraph, LangSmith/Braintrust, frontier model APIs

Benefits

• Competitive base salary: We offer competitive base salaries to recognize the incredible work our employees do.
• Learning & development: We support your development through regular performance check-ins and offer financial support for Learning and Development initiatives.
• Health benefits: We offer full global benefits, including a 100% employer-paid plan and tax-advantaged HSA and FSA options in the US.
• Paid time off: We provide a generous PTO policy, including paid sick time, to support your well-being in and out of the office.
• Equity program: We instill ownership by offering competitive new hire equity grants, plus the opportunity to gain more equity along the way.
• Parental leave: We offer up to 26 weeks of fully paid parental leave to support you and your family.

You care deeply about engineering excellence, supportability and knowledge-sharingExperience post-training or adapting LLMs (SFT, DPO, RLHF/RLAIF, reward modeling) for a production use caseDeep expertise in PyTorch and the modern Python ML stack (Hugging Face, scikit-learn, NumPy, Pandas/Polars)Sound judgment on when to use a frontier model API, a fine-tuned open-weight model, or a classical ML model, balancing cost, latency, and accuracyHands-on experience building production LLM applications: retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), tool/function calling, structured outputs, and agentic workflowsPassionate about applying SOTA techniques to real-world problems, with a willingness to get your hands dirty in the data and domain to achieve measurable outcomesYou’ve shipped agentic systems in production and know their failure modes: tool use, planning, state, recovery and human-in-the-loop8+ years building and shipping ML systems in production, with a proven track record of delivering product-oriented ML solutions, including recent work on LLM-powered productsRigorous about evaluation: you’ve built eval suites, golden datasets and LLM-as-judge pipelinesBS/MS in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or a related field, or equivalent experienceYou have strong written and verbal communication skillsHeavy user of AI coding tools (Cursor, Claude Code) in your daily workflowBuilding multi-agent systems and agent tooling (e.g., LangGraph)Hybrid retrieval: vector search, re-rankers, and embedding fine-tuningVision-language models for document understanding (invoices, bills of lading, customs forms)Multilingual NLPLLMOps: MLflow, Databricks Mosaic AI, and guardrailsExperience with safety, guardrails or auditability for AI in regulated or high-stakes domains (e.g., customs, legal, healthcare, finance)