Lead Machine Learning Scientist

The New York Times•New York, NY

1d•$166,000 - $205,000•Hybrid

About The Position

The New York Times is hiring a Lead Machine Learning Scientist to join the New A.I. Products & Platforms mission. This team is building the next generation of reader-facing A.I. experiences for one of the world's most trusted news organizations. The role will provide technical leadership to a team of ML scientists developing embedding models and semantic retrieval algorithms to power new A.I. experiences across their products. This work will enable teams across the company to build, deploy, and manage applications that use large language models to promote journalism and the business. The team will design and train embedding models for representation learning and fine-tune language models for custom use cases and content enrichment.

Requirements

PhD plus 4+ years experience, or 7+ years experience, in machine learning, statistics, computer science, computational social science, or another quantitative/computational discipline
4+ years of experience in creatively reframing our challenges as Machine Learning tasks
4+ years of experience with data cleaning, preparation, feature engineering, and model selection techniques
2+ years of experience coding and deploying in production environments using Python, developing and deploying complex algorithms that are integrated into company process
2+ years of experience building production systems that use LLMs, vision-language models, embeddings, or other deep learning models to solve user-facing problems.
1+ years of experience mentoring peers or junior ML scientists through pairing and algorithm, model, and code review

Nice To Haves

1+ years of experience with information retrieval or search systems
2+ years of experience collaborating cross-functionally with product managers and software engineers
2+ years of experience scoping and staging work into well-defined milestones and delivering on communicated timelines

Responsibilities

Lead the design and training of embedding models for representation learning, for example using transformer encoders and Two Tower architectures.
Lead the fine-tuning and evaluation of language models for custom use cases and content enrichment.
Productionalize embedding models and language models while working closely with engineering teams, to integrate ML and AI into user-facing products throughout The Times.
Help to define shared practices around evaluation, responsible A.I. use, and what "good" is inside an organization where judgment and independence are important.
Identify novel project opportunities to solve critical problems and act on those proposals.
Scope ongoing product improvements, prioritizing requests from your team.
Build and facilitate relationships across the organization to ensure you meet our projects' goals.
Demonstrate support and understanding of our value of journalistic independence and a strong commitment to our mission to seek the truth and help people understand the world.