Remote Founding ML Engineer (Spectrum)

Description:

• Spectrum is focused on revolutionizing the semantic layer space for software-building organizations by organizing knowledge in a unified ontology that AI agents can efficiently search through and reason over.
• The company is a resident of JetBrains' startup incubator, benefiting from 25 years of developer tooling expertise.
• The role of Founding ML Engineer involves owning the AI and ML engineering stack and defining the research agenda for the team.
• Responsibilities include designing and building the ML/LLM solution for data ingestion, knowledge extraction, retrieval, and reasoning.
• The engineer will create datasets, metrics, and pipelines that drive measurable improvements across the system.
• The role requires architecting and improving agents for context retrieval, knowledge extraction, and data alignment, including prompt engineering, model selection, and inference optimization.
• Establishing MLOps practices such as orchestration, observability, and experiment tracking is also a key responsibility.
• Collaboration with the engineering team on system design and with JetBrains Research on the research agenda is expected.
• The engineer will define hiring criteria, grow the ML team, and shape the ML team culture.

Requirements:

• A proven track record as an ML/AI Lead is required.
• Candidates must have at least five years of experience in ML/AI systems, with a minimum of two years focused on LLMs and generative AI.
• A deep understanding of the LLM ecosystem, including model architectures and fine-tuning approaches, is essential.
• Hands-on experience with prompt engineering and LLM pipeline design, including evaluation, is necessary.
• Familiarity with agentic frameworks such as LangChain, LlamaIndex, LangSmith, smolagents, or equivalent is required.
• Experience with vector databases and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) patterns is needed.
• Candidates should have experience deploying and scaling LLM-powered applications using APIs (e.g., OpenAI or Anthropic) or open-source models.
• Strong Python skills are required, and knowledge of Kotlin would be a plus.
• Excellent communication skills are necessary, with the ability to explain complex technical concepts to diverse audiences.
• Proficiency in English, both written and verbal, is required.

Benefits:

• The position offers a competitive salary along with JetBrains benefits.
• Employees will enjoy a generous runway and corporate resources while maintaining startup autonomy.