Machine Learning Lead

We are looking for Machine Learning Lead.

Your main tasks will be:

• Own the ML strategy for dialogue systems: decide what to build and in what order, and tie those bets to business metrics (ARPU, retention, chat depth).

• Lead a team of 3 ML engineers — set the technical bar, distribute work, hire and let go, grow the people you keep.

• Drive LLM post-training and model adaptation end to end: SFT, LoRA/QLoRA, preference optimization (DPO / ORPO / SimPO / GRPO), dataset construction.

• Design agent harnesses and tool-using LLM systems: tool calling, structured outputs, routing, retries, memory and context, guardrails.

• Build the evaluation layer: offline and pairwise evals, LLM-as-a-judge, regression suites that actually correlate with A/B outcomes.

• Cut dialogue failure modes — loops, contradictions, persona drift, context loss, generic replies — and keep inference efficient on latency and cost per message.

• Stay hands-on where it matters (roughly 10–20% of your time): prototypes, debugging agent traces, reviewing your team's work.

We expect from you:

• Technical degree and a real ML engineering background — you have trained and shipped models yourself, not only managed people who do.

• Experience leading a team of 3–5 ML engineers, including hiring and performance decisions.

• Expert-level Python, solid understanding of transformer architecture and modern LLM behavior, hands-on with training, fine-tuning and evaluation.

• Production experience with LLM systems: APIs, streaming, batching, fallbacks, cost/latency trade-offs, observability over traces and transcripts.

• Ability to read fresh research and turn it into a prototype, an eval and a shipped change with measurable impact.

• Fluent Russian, ready to work in CET (±2) hours.

Nice to have: experience beyond text (computer vision, image generation, multimodal), long-running conversations and character consistency, vLLM / TGI / SGLang, DeepSpeed / FSDP / Accelerate, quantization, safety classifiers.

What do we offer:

• REMOTE OPPORTUNITY to work full-time;

• The initial pay level or pay range for this role will be shared with candidates during the recruitment process and before the commencement of employment;

• Vacation 28 calendar days per year;

• 7 wellness days per year (time off) that can be used to deal with household issues, to lie down and recover without taking sick leave;

• Bonuses up to $5000 for recommending successful applicants for positions in the company;

• 50% payment for professional training, international conferences, and meetings;

• Corporate discount for English lessons;

• ​Health benefits. According to the paychecks, if you are not eligible for corporate medical insurance, the company will compensate you with up to $ 1,000 gross per year per employee. This can be spent on self-purchase of health insurance or on doctor’s fees for yourself and close relatives (spouse, children);

• ​Workplace organization. The company provides all employees with an equipped workplace and all the necessary equipment (table, armchair, wifi, etc.) in our offices or co-working locations. In the other locations, the company provides reimbursement of workplace costs up to $ 1000 gross once every 3 years, according to the paychecks. This money can be spent on the rent of the co-working room, on equipping the working place at home (desk, chair, Internet, etc.) during those 3 years;

• Internal gamified gratitude system: receive bonuses from colleagues and exchange them for our merchandise, team building activities, massage certificates, etc.