Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Thorn is a nonprofit organization dedicated to defending children from sexual exploitation and abuse through technology. The Staff Machine Learning Engineer will design, build, deploy, and maintain machine learning models, classifiers, algorithms, and scalable systems that support child safety, while providing technical leadership, mentoring engineers, and collaborating with cross-functional and external partners.
Responsibilities
- Own end-to-end model development: design, build, test and maintain machine learning systems and algorithms
- Lead machine learning system designs, set engineering standards, lead technical meetings and proactively engage and mentor other engineers
- Help debug, do code review, and support general machine learning initiatives led by other members of the Machine Learning team
- Define data sourcing and labeling strategy for your technical domain, proactively identifying future data needs and partnering with the Sr. Technical Program Manager to drive planning and prioritization
- Work closely with specialists at Thorn to create data labeling guides and support labeling efforts. This may involve engaging with sexually explicit material that is not child sexual abuse material
- Look for opportunities to streamline and reuse work, proactively identifying cross-team dependencies. Anticipate technical risks across ML systems, define architectural guardrails, establish best practices for scalability and reliability
- Represent Thorn as a technical thought leader at conferences and other external forums, advancing the field and strengthening strategic partnerships
- Collaborate with engineers, product managers, product owners, and designers to drive requirements, define scope of work, engage with users, and translate user needs into features and deliverables
- Collaborate with engineers on product teams to maintain and deploy models, algorithms and model serving infrastructure
- Look for opportunities, in collaboration with the Sr. Technical Program Manager, to improve the innovation -> impact cycle across product, academic collaborations, and other external partnerships
- Build relationships and collaborate with external partners
- Look for opportunities to improve systems, author tools and introduce policies/patterns that raise productivity for the Machine Learning team
- Clearly communicate and document problem formulation, feature/model design, training, and evaluation results to technical and non-technical audiences
- Identify new problem spaces within online child safety. Stay abreast of technical developments and breakthroughs with an eye towards applying solutions to our issue space
- Drive roadmap planning and cadence of maintenance vs. new feature development for your areas of ownership
- Conduct data analysis as needed to improve cross-functional understanding
- Collaborate closely with Product and Engineering during planning, software design, model development, and time-sensitive customer support efforts
Skills
- You have a commitment to putting the children we serve at the center of everything you do
- You have a willingness to learn about online child safety and victim identification
- You have 8+ years background in machine learning and/or artificial intelligence, with 3+ years experience in building production-scale computer vision and/or NLP machine learning systems and pipelines
- You have a Ph.D or master's degree in a quantitative field, or equivalent professional experience
- You have an ability and interest in learning and adopting new technologies quickly
- You can work with ambiguity, shifting requirements and collaborate with cross-functional internal and external stakeholders
- You have a passion for machine learning and an aptitude to work in a collaborative environment, can demonstrate empathy for our team and strong advocacy for our users, while balancing the vision and technical constraints of engineering. Success on this team requires humility, curiosity, and a willingness to both teach and learn
- You excel at identifying unique opportunities and translating them into scalable solutions that align cross-functional stakeholders around a clear, compelling, and actionable vision
- You communicate clearly, efficiently, and thoughtfully. We're a highly-distributed team, so written communication is crucial
Benefits
- Remote-first work model structured around working from home most of the time.
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