Senior Engineer | Applied AI

Black Ore; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Black Ore in San Francisco is seeking a Staff Machine Learning Engineer with over 12 years of experience. The role involves designing and engineering NLP solutions and training large language models for the tax industry. Ideal candidates will have a strong background in machine learning, particularly in NLP, and experience with production-ready code.

The position offers opportunities for growth within a dynamic team focused on innovative AI solutions in financial services.

Qualifications

• 12+ years of industry experience working on machine learning projects.
• Experience applying NLP techniques in production environments.
• Proficient in scripting languages such as Python and shell scripts.

Responsibilities

• Design and engineer NLP solutions for the tax industry.
• Train and evaluate large language models.
• Drive engineering initiatives for platform development.

Skills

Natural Language Processing (NLP)

Machine Learning (ML)

Python

Deep Learning

Education

Masters degree in Computer Science or related field

PhD in relevant field (preferred)

Tools

PyTorch

TensorFlow

scikit-learn

Job description

About us

Black Ore is building the leading AI platform designed to accelerate financial services. The company's flagship offering, Tax Autopilot, leverages proprietary AI agents to automate tax preparation and compliance, helping CPA & tax firms overcome the talent shortage and accelerate growth for their practice.

Founded in 2022, we launched with $60 million in early stage funding from some of the world’s leading investors including a16z, Founders Fund, General Catalyst, Khosla Ventures, Oak HC/FT, Trust Ventures and leading tech founders/angel investors including Jason Gardner (Founder and CEO of Marqeta), Max Levchin (Founder of Paypal and Aff...), Tom Glocer (Former CEO of Thomson Reuters), Gokul Rajaram, and Mark Britto (EVP, CPO, PayPal).

Our team has an incredibly ambitious vision to completely transform the way businesses and consumers interact in financial services. We’re looking to hire strong team members to grow the team. Some of the traits we look for are:

• Owner Mentality - Desire to take initiative, identify problems, and implement solutions
• Mission Driven - Passion for building AI/ML solutions that reimagine how businesses and consumers operate
• Intellectually Curious - Excitement going deep for building detailed understanding of the function, role, customer, and problem space
• Team Oriented - Ability to collaborate respectfully and put the team above the self

Qualifications

The Role

We are looking for someone who likes to solve hard problems. Our opportunity is ideal for someone who thinks critically, is constantly driven by curiosity, enjoys being challenged and creating state of the art solutions and is a builder at heart. We are seeking a skilled and driven Staff Machine Learning Engineer with 12+ years of industry experience to join our team. You’ll play a key role in building and deploying machine learning models and AI systems that are reliable, scalable, and impactful. The ideal candidate has experience applying NLP techniques in production environments and thrives in a fast-paced, collaborative setting.

Responsibilities

• Design and engineer NLP solutions to solve real-world problems within the tax industry and push state of the art LLMs and assistants.
• Independently design and implement algorithms, train state of the art large language models (LLM) on large data, and evaluate their performance.
• Drive engineering and science that can be applied to Black Ore platform development
• Fine tune models

Basic Qualifications

• Masters degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Artificial Intelligence or relevant technical field, or equivalent practical experience. PhD preferred but not required.
• Applied Research experience in one or more of these areas: NLP, NLU, machine learning, deep learning, or related fields.
• Direct experience in Summarization, Classification and/or Extraction
• Experience with NER (named-entity recognition)
• End to end experience delivering production-ready code
• 3+ years of experience with development and implementation of LLM algorithm/systems and model training.
• Direct experience in generative AI and LLM's, and implementing solutions to production
• Experience working with machine learning libraries like Pytorch.
• Familiar with scripting languages such as Python and shell scripts.
• Direct experience in Prompt Engineering
• Continued interest in LLM trends and the latest in cutting edge models within AI
• Proficient in Python and ML libraries such as TensorFlow, PyTorch, scikit-learn, or similar
• Strong understanding of ML fundamentals, including supervised/unsupervised learning, model evaluation, feature engineering, and overfitting/underfitting
• Experience working with large datasets and building production-ready data pipelines