Senior Machine Learning Engineer (Remote, Contract)

About the role

Smart Working is seeking a Senior Machine Learning Engineer to design, modernise and productionise AI platforms. The role blends Applied AI, MLOps and backend engineering to deliver reliable, observable ML services at scale.

Key responsibilities

• Refactor, modernise and productionise existing NLP and generative AI models.
• Develop new ML components, pipelines and services primarily using Python.
• Design and automate model evaluation using golden datasets, quality thresholds and guardrails for hallucination and grounding.
• Build infrastructure for shadow testing, A/B testing, fallback strategies and kill‑switches.
• Integrate third‑party AI APIs and create adapters for seamless consumption.

Required profile

• 6+ years of professional AI/ML experience with production deployments.
• 5+ years of MLOps experience and at least 2 years of applied AI work beyond research.
• Strong Python expertise and proven ability to build reliable ML workflows.
• Hands‑on experience with generative AI/LLMs, RAG techniques and model provenance.

Required skills

• Python
• MLOps
• Applied AI, NLP, Generative AI
• FastAPI
• Argo Workflows or similar orchestration
• Docker, Kubernetes
• AWS, Azure or GCP
• TypeScript or Go (optional)
• Speech‑to‑text model experience (optional)