Senior AI Engineer, AI Lab

The role

This role focuses on building and fine-tuning LLM-powered systems for editorial tone, style transfer, retrieval workflows, and multimodal generation. You will work in a small AI Lab team to ship products that influence how readers interact with journalism.

What you will do

• Fine-tune large language models for style and tone alignment
• Design, curate, and manage datasets for fine-tuning
• Build and evaluate RAG pipelines
• Prototype and test TTS pipelines for audio-first products
• Collaborate with infra, frontend, and design leads to ship internal tools and demos
• Own quality evaluation pipelines including human-in-the-loop feedback loops
• Support product experiments for real-time generation, summarisation, or personalization
• Partner with journalists and editors to develop novel evaluation metrics

Required qualifications

• 3+ years experience building with LLMs or NLP pipelines
• Experience with supervised fine-tuning, prompt tuning, or instruction tuning on proprietary datasets
• Strong understanding of fine-tuning paradigms from SFT to RLHF/RLAIF preference modeling
• Strong Python skills including LangChain, HuggingFace Transformers, and data pipelines
• Comfortable defining and tracking generation quality with eval metrics
• Exposure to STT / TTS tools for prototyping
• Strong communication and collaboration mindset
• Curious and exploratory

Nice to have

• Experience fine-tuning models for style or persona
• Exposure to LangSmith or similar observability tools
• Knowledge of voice synthesis, cloning, or emotion conditioning in audio pipelines
• Previous work in media, journalism, podcasting, or content production contexts
• Familiarity with multi-modal generation
• Contributions to open-source LLM tools or libraries
• An interest in the ethical, editorial, and philosophical questions raised by AI-generated content

Benefits

• Highly competitive pension or 401(k) plan
• Private health insurance
• 24/7 access to counselling and wellbeing resources through an Employee Assistance Program
• Work From Anywhere program for up to 25 days per year
• Generous annual and parental leave
• Dedicated days off for volunteering and moving home
• Free access to all The Economist content including online subscription, apps, and podcasts

About the company

The Economist Group is a global media and information-services company. It delivers trusted analysis and insights to individuals and organisations in more than 170 countries.