Senior Data Scientist - NLP
Position Overview
Senior-level data scientist role focused on building and deploying production NLP systems on bare metal infrastructure. This position requires a research-oriented mindset with the ability to build first-in-class products by translating cutting-edge research into innovative production solutions.
Required Qualifications
Experience
- Minimum 5 years in data science / ML engineering roles
- Minimum 3 years tenure in most recent organization in a relevant data science / ML role
- Proven track record of deploying ML models to production
- Experience managing bare metal server infrastructure
Technical Skills
SQL
Advanced query optimization and performance tuningComplex joins, window functions, CTEsExperience with Snowflake, BigQuery, or RedshiftDatabase performance analysis and indexing strategiesNLP Technology Stack
Transformer architecturesRAG pipeline implementationLangChain, LlamaIndex, or similar frameworksVector databases : Pinecone, Weaviate, Chroma, FAISSModel fine-tuning : LoRA, QLoRAEmbedding models and semantic searchPrompt engineering techniquesProgramming & ML Frameworks
Python (advanced level, production-grade code)PyTorch or TensorFlowHuggingFace Transformersscikit-learn, XGBoost, LightGBMInfrastructure & DevOps
Linux system administrationBare metal server managementGPU cluster setup and configurationCUDA / cuDNN installation and driver managementMulti-GPU distributed training setupDocker and KubernetesCI / CD pipelines for ML workflowsProduction Deployment
Model serving : TensorFlow Serving, TorchServe, FastAPI, BentoMLMLOps : MLflow, Weights & Biases, KubeflowModel monitoring and A / B testingLatency optimization and inference scalingCloud & Data Engineering
AWS, GCP, or AzureApache Spark, Airflow / PrefectUnderstanding of on-premise and cloud hybrid architecturesKey Responsibilities
Technical Execution
Design and implement production NLP solutions using state-of-the-art language modelsBuild and optimize complex SQL data pipelines processing millions of recordsDeploy ML models on bare metal GPU infrastructureConfigure and maintain GPU clusters for training and inferenceImplement MLOps practices : versioning, monitoring, automated retrainingOptimize model inference for latency and throughputTroubleshoot CUDA, driver, and hardware-level issuesSet up distributed training across physical serversResearch and prototype emerging ML techniquesLeadership & Strategy
Lead end-to-end ML projects from problem definition to production deploymentDrive innovation by researching and implementing first-in-class product featuresCoordinate cross-functional teams including data engineers, domain experts, and full-stack developers to deliver integrated solutionsDefine technical architecture and design decisions for ML systemsDrive adoption of ML best practices and engineering standards across teamsCollaborate with product and engineering leadership on ML roadmap and prioritiesPresent technical findings and recommendations to executive stakeholdersOwn critical ML infrastructure decisions and vendor evaluationsChampion innovation by evaluating and integrating cutting-edge ML researchLead cross-functional initiatives between data science, engineering, and product teamsFacilitate effective collaboration between technical and non-technical stakeholdersTranslate latest research papers into production-ready solutionsTeam Development
Mentor and coach junior data scientists and ML engineersConduct code reviews and provide technical guidanceDevelop training materials and knowledge-sharing sessionsParticipate in hiring and building the data science teamEstablish coding standards and documentation practicesRequired Competencies
Research-oriented mindset with ability to innovate and build first-in-class productsAbility to work independently with minimal supervision and drive projects autonomouslyStrong analytical and quantitative aptitudeExcellent problem-solving and logical reasoning skillsProven ability to collaborate with cross-functional teams (data engineers, domain experts, full-stack developers)Strong communication skills to translate technical concepts for non-technical stakeholdersWillingness to explore uncharted territory and experiment with novel approachesSelf-motivated with strong ownership mentalityStrong understanding of hardware constraints and optimizationAbility to work independently with bare metal infrastructureExperience with both cloud and on-premise deploymentsProven ability to take projects from research to productionTrack record of staying current with ML research and innovationsStrong debugging and troubleshooting skillsEvaluation Process
SQL optimization and Python coding assessmentML system design interviewTechnical deep-dive on NLP and production MLTake-home project : end-to-end ML problemPreferred Qualifications
Experience with pre-training multi-modal models (vision-language, audio-text, etc.)Hands-on experience with large-scale distributed training frameworks (DeepSpeed, FSDP, Megatron-LM)Contributions to open source ML projectsTechnical blog or active GitHub portfolioExperience with model quantization and efficient inferencePublications or conference presentationsKnowledge of multi-modal architectures (CLIP, Flamingo, GPT-4V style models)