Machine Learning Engineer

Lovelace AI; Pittsburgh (Allegheny County); On-site; USD 140,000 - 230,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive compensation

Comprehensive benefits

Inclusive work environment

Job summary

Lovelace AI, Inc. is seeking a Machine Learning Engineer to own ML problems end to end, from framing to shipping a production system. You’ll decide data needs, model types, and how the surrounding system should operate, working on a team led by the Chief Scientist.

We value engineers who ramp quickly, possess strong research backgrounds, and can think critically about their own work and agents. Industry experience isn’t required, but demonstrated problem ownership is essential.

Qualifications

• Own ambiguous problems end to end, from problem framing to production.
• Strong ML fundamentals, from probabilistic foundations to large language models.
• Experience building the system around a model: data pipelines, evaluation, deployment, and scale.

Responsibilities

• Frame ambiguous product needs as precise ML problems, and set your own requirements.
• Decide what data is useful, which model types fit, and when to go beyond fine-tuning.
• Direct AI coding agents, review their output critically, and push back when their design decisions are wrong.
• Design the systems around your models: data pipelines, serving, evaluation, and monitoring.
• Choose metrics that reflect real outcomes, and catch when they mislead.
• Stand up new jobs, make changes across the codebase, and ship NLP and LLM systems to production, owning their correctness.
• Challenge assumptions, including teammates' and your own, to get to the right answer.

Skills

Ambiguous problems

End-to-end ownership

ML fundamentals

Python

Model deployment

Tools

Python

Job description

About Us:

Lovelace is the only provider of enterprise-scale context engines capable of analyzing trillions of real-time data points to create knowledge graphs that are usable by autonomous agents at the speed, scale, and accuracy required for mission-critical analysis.

Lovelace's context engine platform, Elemental, uniquely integrates data ingestion, entity resolution, and graph building into a single pipeline that empowers agentic deployments, delivering 1000X the investigative power for complex queries. With its proprietary ground-breaking YottaGraph, Lovelace provides enterprises with real-time, real-world context, enabling agents to understand the impact of global intelligence on enterprise data for unmatched insights with millisecond precision.

Founded in 2023 by Andrew Moore, former head of Google Cloud AI, dean of Carnegie Mellon's School of Computer Science, and first AI advisor for U.S. CENTCOM, Lovelace currently works with some of the largest public and private enterprises in the world.

Job Summary:

• As a Machine Learning Engineer, you'll own ML problems end to end, from framing an ambiguous question to shipping a production system. There's no ticket queue and no narrow scope: everyone here, including newer engineers, stands up new jobs and makes changes across the codebase without close supervision. You'll decide what data matters, which models fit, and how the system around them should work. The role is roughly half research and half engineering, on a team that reports to our Chief Scientist.

  At Lovelace, every engineer is a manager of AI. Our engineers work alongside AI coding agents every day, and the most valuable thing you'll bring is judgment: knowing what to build, catching when an agent gets it wrong, and owning the design decisions.

  We're looking for people who ramp in weeks, not months. You don't need industry experience; strong research lab backgrounds are welcome. What matters is that you've owned hard problems and can think critically about your own work and your agents'.

Key Responsibilities:

• Frame ambiguous product needs as precise ML problems, and set your own requirements.
• Decide what data is useful, which model types fit, and when to go beyond fine-tuning.
• Direct AI coding agents, review their output critically, and push back when their design decisions are wrong.
• Design the systems around your models: data pipelines, serving, evaluation, and monitoring.
• Choose metrics that reflect real outcomes, and catch when they mislead.
• Stand up new jobs, make changes across the codebase, and ship NLP and LLM systems to production, owning their correctness.
• Challenge assumptions, including teammates' and your own, to get to the right answer.

Qualifications:

• A track record of owning ambiguous problems end to end, in a research lab, a startup, or your own projects.
• Strong ML fundamentals, from probabilistic foundations to modern deep learning and LLM architectures.
• Experience building the system around a model, not just training it: data pipelines, evaluation, deployment, and how it behaves at scale.
• Hands-on experience with AI coding agents, and a clear sense of where they go wrong.
• Expert-level Python and a strong testing discipline. You understand how your code works.
• The confidence to push back, with evidence, on requirements, teammates, and agents.

Preferred Skills:

• NLP, knowledge graphs, entity resolution, or agentic systems.
• Go or other systems programming experience.
• Open-source contributions, side projects, or publications with working code.
• Background from a strong research lab. A PhD is welcome but not required.

Benefits:

LovelaceAI offers competitive compensation packages, comprehensive benefits. We provide a supportive and inclusive work environment where your skills and expertise can make a significant impact on the safety and security of our communities.

Lovelace's founding team includes:

Andrew Moore, who has a track record of building impactful AI systems, designing them with human rights impact assessments as a top priority, leading the AI division of one of the world's foremost cloud companies, and actively participating in machine learning and AI research over the past two decades.

Toby Smith, well known in the Pittsburgh Tech community for his engineering leadership and design skills, and who has led many of the most ambitious and complex system infrastructure projects in Google Pittsburgh and NetApp.

Here is a note from Andrew Moore to people who are reading these Job Postings:

"Hi folks, I'm so glad you are potentially interested in Lovelace AI. This area means a lot to me because while I am an AI optimist, I also think that we technologists owe it to a rightly skeptical world to show that modern intelligent systems can actually be useful. Usefulness comes in many guises: from life sciences to education and from transportation to entertainment and many others. For many of us, security and public safety is also very high on that list. That reasoning leads to this conclusion: I'm determined to make sure that the people building Lovelace AI gain a lot from the experience, including the chance to solve fascinating problems in computer science, AI, business development, customer success and product management. I also hope that we all learn from each other in a highly enriching work environment. But my main hope is that we have a shared sense of accomplishment as we see an increasing number of national security and public safety domains made safer through sensible and robust use of advanced computer science."