Machine Learning Engineer II

Abnormal AI, Inc.; United States; On-site; USD 160,700 - 231,000; Full time

Job summary

Abnormal AI is seeking a Machine Learning Engineer to join the Message Detection - Attack Detection team in the United States. You will design and deploy ML-based email detection capabilities at scale, combining rules, models, and feature engineering to protect customers from attacks.

You will work on high-recall detectors, build production pipelines, monitor performance, and collaborate with cross-functional teams to translate business needs into robust ML solutions for real-world security

Qualifications

• 3+ years designing, building and deploying ML applications in text understanding, NLP, or related domains.
• 1+ years production pipelines for model training and evaluation with reproducible results.
• Experience with SQL, pandas and Spark to build data and metric pipelines.
• Ability to translate business requirements into simple, generalizable ML models.
• Systematic debugging of data and ML/heuristics issues.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement systems that combine rules, models, features, and inputs into an email detection product.
• Identify and propose new feature groups or ML approaches to improve detection efficacy.
• Collaborate with infrastructure & systems engineers to productionize signals for detection.
• Write code with testability, readability, and edge-case handling in mind.
• Train models on well-defined datasets to improve efficacy against attacks.
• Monitor and improve FN/FP and recall for detection categories.
• Analyze FN and FP datasets to identify capability gaps and suggest short-term improvements.
• Contribute to data pipelines and present results to customers when needed.

Skills

Python

Numpy

Sklearn

PyTorch

TensorFlow

SQL

Pandas

NLP

Education

BS in Computer Science or related field

MS degree (nice to have)

Tools

Pandas

Spark

Job description

About The Role

Abnormal AI is looking for a Machine Learning Engineer to join the Message Detection - Attack Detection team. At Abnormal, we protect our customers against nefarious adversaries who are constantly evolving their techniques and tactics to outwit and undermine the traditional approaches to Security. That's what makes our novel behavioral-based approach so... Abnormal has constantly been named as one of the top cybersecurity startups and our behavioral AI system has helped us win various cybersecurity accolades resulting in being trusted to protect more than 25% of the Fortune 500 (and ever growing).

In a landscape where a single successful attack can lead to financial losses of millions of dollars, the Attack Detection team plays the central role of building an extremely high recall Detection Engine that can operate on hundreds of millions of messages at milliseconds latency. The Attack Detection team's mission statement is to provide world-class detector efficacy to tackle changing attack landscape using a combination of generalizable and auto trained models as well as specific detectors for high value attack categories.

This team is solving a multi-layered detection problem, which involves modeling communication patterns to establish enterprise-wide baselines, incorporating these patterns as robust signals, and combining these signals with contextual information to create extremely precise systems. The team builds discriminative signals at various levels including message level (eg. presence of particular phrases), sender-level (eg.frequency of sender) and recipient level (eg.likelihood of receiving a safe message). These signals are then combined and utilized to train highly accurate model based as well as heuristic detectors. Additionally, to continuously adapt to new unseen attacks, the team builds out different stages in our automated model retraining pipelines including data analytics and generation stages, modeling stages, production evaluation stages as well as automated deployment stages.

This role would also have an opportunity to have a significant impact on the overall charter, direction and roadmap of the team. The Machine Learning Engineer would be involved in understanding the domain of false negatives i.e. the current and future attacks which can cause significant customer workflow disruption. They would help define the technical roadmap required to address the most pressing customer problems and simultaneously operate our detection decisioning system at an extremely high recall.

What You Will Do

• Design and implement systems that combine rules, models, feature engineering, and business and product inputs into an email detection product, with senior engineer guidance.
• Understand features that distinguish safe emails from email attacks, and how our model stack enables us to catch them.
• Identify and recommend new feature groups or ML model approaches that can significantly improve detection efficacy for a product. Work with infrastructure & systems engineers to productionize signals to feed into the detection system.
• Writes code with testability, readability, edge cases, and errors in mind.
• Train models on well-defined datasets to improve model efficacy on specialized attacks
• Actively monitor and improve FN rates and efficacy rates for our message detection product attack categories, through feature engineering, rules and ML modeling.
• Analyze FN and FP datasets to categorize capability gaps and recommend short term feature and rule ideas to improve our detection efficacy.
• Contribute in other areas of the stack: building and debugging data pipelines, or presenting results back to customers in our tools when the occasion arises

Must Have

• 3+ years experience designing, building and deploying machine learning applications in one of the domains of text understanding, entity recognition, NLP experience, computer vision, recommendation systems, or search.
• 1+ years of experience with writing stable and production level pipelines for model training and evaluation leading to reproducible models and metrics.
• Experience with data analytics and wielding SQL+pandas+spark framework to both build data and metric generation pipelines, and answer critical questions about system efficacy or counterfactual treatments.
• Ability to understand business requirements thoroughly and bias toward designing a simplest yet generalizable ML model / system that can accomplish the goal.
• Uses a systematic approach to debug both data and system issues within ML / heuristics models.
• Fluent with Python and machine learning toolkits like numpy, sklearn, pytorch and tensorflow.
• Effective software engineering skills who can find answers quickly from code base and writes structured, readable, well tested and efficient code.
• BS degree in Computer Science, Applied Sciences, Information Systems or other related engineering field

Nice To Have

• MS degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering or other related engineering field
• Experience with big data, statistics and Machine Learning
• Experience with algorithms and optimization

This position is not:

• A role focused on optimizing existing machine learning models
• A research-oriented role that's two-steps removed from the product or customer
• A statistics/data science meets ML role

#LI-RT1

Compensation

Actual compensation will be determined based on several non-discriminatory factors including skills, experience, qualifications, and geographic location. In addition to base salary, this role may be eligible for bonus or incentive compensation, equity, and a comprehensive benefits package.

Base salary range: $160,700 – $231,000 USD

AI and our hiring process

Abnormal AI uses AI-assisted tools to help our recruiting team prepare for candidate interviews. These tools analyze resume content and role requirements to suggest interview questions and identify areas for the interviewer to explore. They do not make hiring decisions or screen candidates automatically. Every decision about a candidacy is made by a person.

Abnormal AI is an equal opportunity employer. Qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, disability, protected veteran status or other characteristics protected by law. For our EEO policy statement please click here. If you would like more information on your EEO rights under the law, please click here.