Senior Staff Machine Learning Engineer

The role

You will lead the AI development for Altana Nexus, an agentic platform for global trade. You will build models and AI agents that process trade data to provide real-time decisions on risk, compliance, and enforcement.

What you will do

• Drive the technical direction for agentic systems.
• Define the architecture and roadmap for models and agentic systems.
• Build the pipeline from ingestion to decision.
• Lead the design of systems for ingestion, document understanding, entity resolution, inference and routing.
• Adapt models to trade using analyst feedback and production outcomes.
• Design the observability and feedback stack.
• Mentor senior engineers and raise the technical bar across Engineering.
• Work with software engineers, data scientists, product managers and customers to generate new business ideas.

Required qualifications

• BS/MS in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or a related field, or equivalent experience
• 10+ years building and shipping ML systems in production
• Proven track record of delivering product-oriented ML solutions, including recent work on LLM-powered products
• Deep expertise in PyTorch and the modern Python ML stack (Hugging Face, scikit-learn, NumPy, Pandas/Polars)
• Hands-on experience building production LLM applications: retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), tool/function calling, structured outputs, and agentic workflows
• Shipped agentic systems in production
• Experience post-training or adapting LLMs (SFT, DPO, RLHF/RLAIF, reward modeling) for a production use case
• Built eval suites, golden datasets and LLM-as-judge pipelines
• Sound judgment on when to use a frontier model API, a fine-tuned open-weight model, or a classical ML model
• Senior Staff-level technical leadership
• Strong written and verbal communication skills
• Heavy user of AI coding tools (Cursor, Claude Code) in your daily workflow

Nice to have

• Building multi-agent systems and agent tooling (e.g., LangGraph)
• Hybrid retrieval: vector search, re-rankers, and embedding fine-tuning
• Vision-language models for document understanding (invoices, bills of lading, customs forms)
• Multilingual NLP
• LLMOps: MLflow, Databricks Mosaic AI, and guardrails
• Experience with safety, guardrails or auditability for AI in regulated or high-stakes domains

Benefits

• Flexible Time Off (FTO)
• Paid Parental Leave (14 weeks for non-birthing, adoptive, and foster parents; up to 26 weeks for birthing parents)
• Medical, vision, and dental benefits
• 100% employer paid high deductible health plan
• Employer contribution to Health Savings Account (HSA)
• Flexible Spending Account (FSA) option
• Life, short, and long-term disability and AD&D insurance
• 401(k) Savings with Fidelity
• Commuter Benefits
• Free premium subscription to Calm
• Pet Insurance
• Employee Assistance Program

About the company

Altana is the network for trusted trade. Their AI-powered product network empowers governments and businesses to build a more resilient and secure global economy.