Machine Learning Engineering Lead

Sightly Enterprises, Inc. • New York, NY

3d • Remote

About The Position

Sightly is a growing technology company leading the revolution in real-time marketing and brand intelligence. Join us as we pursue our disruptive mission to empower businesses everywhere to make the most authentic + profitable decisions in real time. Our AI-driven Brand Mentality® platform enables brands and agencies to leverage an ever-changing ocean of news, premium publisher, CTV, social, creator, and audience data to make more intelligent decisions at the speed of culture. At Sightly, we’re passionate about our product, our customers, our impact on the world, and most importantly our team.

Requirements

• Strong foundation across classical ML, neural networks, and Transformers, reaching for the right tool rather than the trendiest one
• Comfortable with both supervised and unsupervised paradigms: classification, regression, clustering, dimensionality reduction, representation learning
• Practical fluency with NLP and at least working familiarity with computer vision for image and video enrichment
• Understanding of when a simple model beats a complex one, and the discipline to ship the simple one
• Track record of structuring and running experiments end-end: hypothesis, design, instrumentation, analysis, decision
• Comfortable with ad hoc statistical testing, picking the right test for the task, reasoning about power, controlling for confounds
• Knows the difference between a model that benchmarks well offline and one that holds up in production
• Research mindset paired with a shipping mindset: rigorous, but allergic to research-for-its-own-sake
• Experience building optimization systems, whether mathematical optimization, heuristics, or learned policies, applied to a real-world domain
• Comfortable reasoning about objective functions, constraints, and tradeoffs in messy business contexts
• Strong Python and the standard ML stack: scikit-learn, PyTorch, TensorFlow, HuggingFace, NumPy, pandas
• FastAPI and async/await patterns for serving models and building ML-facing services
• Experience working with data at scale, including the practical realities of billions of records: partitioning, sampling, distributed processing, cost management
• GCP for training, serving, and infrastructure, such as Vertex AI, Cloud Run, GCS, or equivalent
• PostgreSQL and Snowflake for working with large-scale data
• Docker and CI/CD pipelines for reproducible, deployable ML workloads
• Comfortable with the realities of production ML: data drift, retraining cadence, monitoring, cost management
• Experience leading or mentoring engineers, even informally, through code review, technical direction, and raising the bar on quality
• Strong collaboration habits with Data Engineering, and the ability to translate fluently between technical and business audiences
• Can sit with an Account Manager or Performance Manager, understand what they actually need, and turn it into a tractable modeling problem
• Clean code habits, sensible architecture, strong typing discipline
• Test-driven mindset for ML code: covering data assumptions, edge cases, and regression paths, not just happy paths
• Comfortable with modern dev practices: Git, code review, CI/CD

Nice To Haves

• Advertising, adtech, or media industry experience
• Familiarity with LLMs and modern AI tooling, useful context for the broader engineering org but not the focus of this role
• Causal inference or uplift modeling background
• Experience with recommendation systems or ranking
• 5+ years of ML experience, ideally with a foundation built before the LLM era

Responsibilities

• Enrichment models across our cultural data pipeline: entity extraction, topic and stance classification, embeddings, clustering, sentiment, brand safety, and related tasks across billions of news and social records
• Multi-modal enrichment for image and video signals from social platforms, complementing our text-heavy core
• Ad optimization systems built from the ground up, including bid optimization, budget allocation, creative selection, audience targeting, or related problems, grounded in historical performance data and well-reasoned heuristics
• Experimentation design and execution: framing the question, choosing the right test, instrumenting it, and producing results the business can act on
• Production ML infrastructure on GCP: training, evaluation, deployment, monitoring, and the glue that keeps models reliable as data shifts
• Technical leadership for a small ML team, including code review, mentorship, prioritization, and raising the bar on rigor without slowing delivery
• Cross-functional partnership with Data Engineering on pipeline integration, and with Account Management and Performance Managers to translate business problems into model problems

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed