Senior Staff Machine Learning Engineer

Altana•Washington, DC

1d•$250,000 - $295,000•Remote

About The Position

Altana is the network for trusted trade. Our AI-powered product network empowers governments and businesses to build a more resilient and secure global economy while keeping trade flowing. We're looking for a Senior Staff Machine Learning Engineer to lead the AI behind Altana Nexus, our agentic platform for global trade. You'll work on a continuous stream of public and proprietary trade data (shipments, customs filings, trade documents), and build the models and AI agents that turn it into real-time decisions on risk, compliance and enforcement for governments and the world's largest companies.

Requirements

BS/MS in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or a related field, or equivalent experience
10+ years building and shipping ML systems in production, with a 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
You've shipped agentic systems in production and know their failure modes: tool use, planning, state, recovery and human-in-the-loop
Experience post-training or adapting LLMs (SFT, DPO, RLHF/RLAIF, reward modeling) for a production use case
Rigorous about evaluation: you've 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, balancing cost, latency, and accuracy
Senior Staff-level technical leadership: you set architecture direction across teams, mentor engineers, and turn ambiguous problems into roadmaps
Passionate about applying SOTA techniques to real-world problems, with a willingness to get your hands dirty in the data and domain to achieve measurable outcomes
You care deeply about engineering excellence, supportability and knowledge-sharing
You have strong written and verbal communication skills
Heavy user of AI coding tools (Cursor, Claude Code) in your daily workflow

Nice To Haves

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 (e.g., customs, legal, healthcare, finance)

Responsibilities

Drive the technical direction for agentic systems. Define the architecture and roadmap for the models and agentic systems that process trade data as it arrives (shipments, customs declarations, invoices, bills of lading) and turn it into risk, classification and compliance decisions in real time.
Build the pipeline from ingestion to decision. Lead the design of reliable, cost-efficient systems for ingestion, document understanding, entity resolution, inference and routing across models, at the scale of global trade.
Adapt models to trade. Use analyst feedback, production outcomes and agent traces to fine-tune and post-train models (SFT, DPO, RL with domain graders) where it measurably beats prompting, and keep every model improving over time.
Design the observability and feedback stack. Build the evals, tracing and feedback loops that decide what ships and catch regressions in production.
Lead beyond your team. Mentor senior engineers, raise the technical bar across Engineering, and help shape how we hire and level ML talent.
Shape the product and the business. Work with software engineers, data scientists, product managers and customers to generate new business ideas and turn ambiguous problems into shipped capabilities.

Benefits

Competitive equity grants
Discretionary bonus or a variable compensation plan
Flexible Time Off (FTO)
Industry leading Paid Parental Leave (PPL): 14 weeks for non-birthing, adoptive, and foster parents; up to 26 weeks for birthing parents, all paid at 100% of base salary.
Medical, vision, and dental benefits with generous employer contributions
High deductible health plan is 100% employer paid for employees
Employer contribution to Health Savings Account (HSA)
Flexible Spending Account (FSA) option
Life, short- and long-term disability, and AD&D insurance coverage at no cost
Fidelity 401(k) retirement savings program
Commuter Benefits
Free premium subscription to Calm
Wishbone insurance and/or Total Pet vet service and telehealth discount plan
Employee Assistance Program
Dependent Care FSA