Senior Machine Learning Engineer

About Faculty

Faculty transforms organisational performance through safe, impactful and human-led AI. 

We are Europe’s leading applied AI company, and saw its potential a decade ago - long before the current hype cycle. 

We founded in 2014 with our Fellowship programme, training academics to become commercial data scientists. 

Today, we provide over 300 global customers with industry-leading software, and bespoke AI consultancy for retail, healthcare, energy, and governmental organisations, as well as our award winning Fellowship. 

Our expertise and safety credentials are such that OpenAI asked us to be their first technical partner, helping customers deploy cutting-edge generative AI safely. 

Our high-impact work has saved lives through forecasting NHS demand during covid, produced green energy by routing boats towards the wind, slashed marketing spend by predicting customer spending habits, and kept children safe online. 

AI is an epoch-defining technology. We want people to join us who can help our customers reap its enormous benefits safely.

What You'll Be Doing

You will design, build, and deploy production-grade software, infrastructure, and MLOps systems that leverage machine learning within our Life Sciences Business Unit. The work you do will help our customers solve a broad range of high-impact problems in the Retail and Consumer space - examples of which can be found here.

You are engineering-focused, with a keen interest and working knowledge of operationalised machine learning. You have a desire to take cutting-edge ML applications into the real world. You will develop new methodologies and champion best practices for managing AI systems deployed at scale, with regard to technical, ethical and practical requirements. You will support both technical and non-technical stakeholders to deploy ML to solve real-world problems. To enable this, we work in cross-functional teams with representation from commercial, data science, product management and design specialities to cover all aspects of AI product delivery.

The Machine Learning Engineering team is responsible for the engineering aspects of our customer delivery projects. As a Machine Learning Engineer, you’ll be essential to helping us achieve that goal by:

• Building software and infrastructure that leverages Machine Learning;
• Creating reusable, scalable tools to enable better delivery of ML systems
• Working with our customers to help understand their needs
• Working with data scientists and engineers to develop best practices and new technologies; and
• Implementing and developing Faculty’s view on what it means to operationalise ML software.

We’re a rapidly growing organisation, so roles are dynamic and subject to change. Your role will evolve alongside business needs, but you can expect your key responsibilities to include:

• Working in cross-functional teams of engineers, data scientists, designers and managers to deliver technically sophisticated, high-impact systems.
• Working with senior engineers to scope projects and design systems
• Providing technical expertise to our customers
• Technical Delivery

Who We're Looking For

At Faculty, your attitude and behaviour are just as important as your technical skill. We look for individuals who can support our values, foster our culture, and deliver for our organisation.

We like people who combine expertise and ambition with optimism -- who are interested in changing the world for the better -- and have the drive and intelligence to make it happen. If you’re the right candidate for us, you probably:

• Think scientifically, even if you’re not a scientist - you test assumptions, seek evidence and are always looking for opportunities to improve the way we do things.
• Love finding new ways to solve old problems - when it comes to your work and professional development, you don’t believe in ‘good enough’. You always seek new ways to solve old challenges.
• Are pragmatic and outcome-focused - you know how to balance the big picture with the little details and know a great idea is useless if it can’t be executed in the real world.

To succeed in this role, you’ll need the following - these are illustrative requirements and we don’t expect all applicants to have experience in everything (70% is a rough guide):

• Understanding of and interest in the full machine learning lifecycle, including deploying trained machine learning models developed using common frameworks such as Scikit-learn, TensorFlow, or PyTorch
• Understanding of the core concepts of probability and statistics and familiarity with common supervised and unsupervised learning techniques
• Experience in Software Engineering including programming in Python.
• Technical experience of cloud architecture, security, deployment, and open-source tools. Hands-on experience required of at least one major cloud platform
• Demonstrable experience with containers and specifically Docker and Kubernetes
• Comfortable in a high-growth startup environment.
• Outstanding verbal and written communication.
• Excitement about working in a dynamic role with the autonomy and freedom you need to take ownership of problems and see them through to execution
• Knowledge of (or interest in) retail-focused solutions around understanding consumer behaviours

Culture & Benefits at Faculty

The Faculty team is diverse and distinctive, and we all come from different personal, professional and organisational backgrounds. We all have one thing in common: we are driven by a deep intellectual curiosity that powers us forward each day. This curiosity pushes us to seek truth and understanding in everything we do, to execute work in a nimble and pragmatic manner, to foster talent in one another and always to challenge assumptions.

Faculty is the professional challenge of a lifetime. You’ll be surrounded by an impressive group of brilliant minds working to achieve our collective goals. Our consultants, product developers, business development specialists, operations professionals and more all bring something unique to Faculty, and you’ll learn something new from everyone you meet. You’ll also have the opportunity to make your mark on a high-growth start-up now poised to expand internationally.

Fostering talent is one of our core values, it’s built into our culture and what we offer. Faculty was founded by people who are passionate about continuous learning, and adding value to our people.

Some of our benefits:

• Unlimited holidays: We encourage each other to use this time to take a break, work on personal projects, or to spend time with their friends and family.
• Genuinely flexible working: We believe people have needs, responsibilities and interests that require something different to a strict working day. We trust people to organise and take accountability for their own work and do our best to support their lives outside Faculty. We provide you with all you need to work from home, including a laptop, keyboard, chair…even Sony headphones!
• Equity: We want you to benefit from Faculty’s growth and success.
• Fantastic private health, optical and dental insurance for you & your family - including 24/7 unlimited virtual private GP appointments and covering pre-existing medical conditions.
• Access to mental health coaching with Sanctus
• Free breakfast, weekly lunches and more fruit, drinks and snacks than you could ever eat when you're in the office.
• We work hard and make sure we enjoy what we do. So we have frequent socials and informal get-togethers to help make sure you enjoy your time with us. You’ll make friends and professional connections that will last a lifetime.