ML / MLOps Research Engineer

About us

Fuzzy Labs is a fast-growing, Manchester-based tech consultancy that helps a diverse range of clients research, prototype, and productionise machine learning. Our work sits across the whole development lifecycle, from prototyping new machine learning models to building scalable and secure production ML systems, and everything in between.

We’ve had considerable growth over the last few years and we’re looking to continue with this momentum, expand our role within the community, and continue to deliver high-quality solutions to our clients.

The role

We’re looking for an ML Research Engineer to join our team and help deliver projects for our secure government customers, with work spanning ML research through to production ML and MLOps.

The ideal candidate will be motivated to grow and progress in line with the company’s ambitions: we’re looking for passionate engineers with an appetite for keeping up with the cutting edge, an eye for detail, and a knack for creative problem solving.

As well as being a great engineer, motivated by the chance to be at the forefront of the industry, you’ll also enjoy being part of a culture that values:

• Loving what we do: a real passion for Open Source, AI, MLOps, and taking pride in our work.
• Just trying it: we love to develop new skills, solve new problems and thrive on a challenge.
• Being greater than the sum of parts: we are a team, one that isn’t just us but our customers and our community.
• Positive impact: AI is going to change the world. We choose to use it for good and leave a positive legacy.

What you’ll do

Our engineers collaborate closely with their team leads and the customer to design and implement high quality solutions. We encourage our engineers to work with a high degree of autonomy and take part in every stage of the project delivery lifecycle, including:

• Working closely with clients to understand their needs, build strong relationships, and bring them along on the journey. This includes presenting back our solutions in demos and participating in workshops and training sessions.
• Designing and implementing features to a high standard of engineering, including good documentation and automated testing.
• Contributing to sprint planning sessions, retrospectives and code reviews, working with your team lead to plan your project work.
• Ensuring our high engineering standards are maintained and our clients are delighted.
• Staying up-to-date with a fast-moving industry, embracing new tools and frameworks, and sharing our learnings with the team.

As well as client work, we also set aside time to work on R&D projects and produce content in the form of blogs and videos. These projects are how we keep on top of a fast-moving technology landscape, in addition to being our greatest source of marketing. You’ll have the opportunity to craft your own voice in the MLOps community through R&D content.

The important details

• Holiday: 25 days holiday rising to 30 with each year of service.
• Family leave: Enhanced family leave, including maternity, paternity and adoption leave.
• Healthcare: Healthcare cash plan.
• Development: £500 annual personal development budget and AI assistant of your choice.
• Equity: Equity option scheme, giving you a genuine stake in the business.
• Office: Hybrid working in a vibrant, central Manchester office with free fruit, cereals, and hot & cold drinks.
• Travel: Due to the need to work high-side in this role, you may be required to work from customer sites (within Manchester) up to 5 days per week, or to split your time between the Fuzzy Labs office and customer sites.
• Working pattern: We are a hybrid-working organisation, ordinarily spending three days each week in the office (Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays), and working remotely on the remaining days.
• Other benefits: Cycle to Work Scheme and secure bike storage, paid time off for charity and volunteering, and company socials, summer and Christmas parties.

Skills and experience

Our team is made up of a mix of backgrounds. We are looking for smart, curious people who are always expanding their knowledge, and exploring new and emerging technologies. If you get excited about keeping up with the newest large language models, or optimising text retrieval with a vector database, then you’ll fit right in.

• An undergraduate degree in computer science, mathematics, or similar, or a relevant postgraduate degree.
• Active SC clearance (minimum) and experience working on secure government projects, ideally in high-side environments.
• A passion for coding, machine learning, and open source technologies.
• Demonstrable Python programming experience.
• Proven research engineering experience in a secure government context, able to take ideas found in research literature and apply them to concrete customer problems in a repeatable manner.
• Awareness of topics surrounding ML security and safety, along with an understanding of ML model internals (desirable). Along with an awareness of the broad landscape of machine learning applications, tools, and technologies and willing to deepen your knowledge.
• Knowledge of transformer architecture and experience working with large language models.
• Experience delivering software using an agile development methodology.
• Fluency in our core tooling: Git, Unix/Linux, Docker. Plus, a strong opinion on your IDE / editor of choice is welcome ;)
• Ability to work at pace, adapt to evolving project needs, and proactively engage with customers.

Interested?

If you’d like to work with us, please apply here.

Please include a few words about yourself and what interests you about the role, and a link to your Github (or Bitbucket, etc). If you’re on Kaggle, or have a tech blog, cool side-project, or an Instagram for your cat, dog, etc, send us that too!

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