Oliver Bernard
Machine Learning Engineer (Up to £180k + equity)
Requirements
Candidates need 2+ years of experience shipping ML systems in a startup environment with strong Python and deep learning skills. A bachelor's degree from a top university is required.
Job Description
Machine Learning Engineer | Up to £180k + Equity | London, 5 Days Onsite
We're working with a well-funded London AI startup building complex production ML systems for major global organisations.
The business is tackling a technically difficult problem that sits across large-scale modelling, LLMs and real-world decision support.
They've already secured strong commercial traction, are backed by leading investors, and are now expanding the engineering team around the core ML platform.
This role is focused on taking ambitious research ideas and turning them into reliable production systems.
The Role
You'll sit between research and engineering, owning the path from ML prototype through to deployment, optimisation and scale.
Responsibilities
- Take new ML research from prototype through to production
- Fine-tune, post-train and distil language models
- Build and optimise inference systems at scale
- Design data pipelines for large, messy real-world datasets
- Improve model performance, latency and cost
- Own ML systems end-to-end from experimentation through deployment
Requirements
- 2+ years shipping ML systems in a startup or high-ownership environment
- Strong experience with deep learning and language models
- Hands-on experience with fine-tuning, RL, distillation or model post-training
- Strong Python engineering skills
- Experience deploying models used by real customers, within a startup or fast growing scale-up environment.
- Strong academic pedigree with a bachelors degree from a top university.
Sponsorship is available for strong candidates.
Tech
Python, LLMs, fine-tuning, RL, model distillation, distributed training, inference optimisation, data pipelines.
Location
London, 5 days per week onsite.
Package
Up to £180,000 depending on experience plus equity.
Education
Skills
About Oliver Bernard
We build Data & AI, Engineering and Product teams A founder-led AI, Engineering and Product recruitment partner operating across UK and Europe, with particular strength in London, Madrid, Barcelona, Berlin, Lisbon and Zurich. We cover all levels from grad to C-Suite within permanent and contract positions as well as onshore and nearshore project delivery. Specialties: AI Engineering | Data Engineering | Analytics Engineering | Data Science | Machine Learning | Platform Engineering | Cloud Infrastructure | Engineering Leadership | Product Management | Executive Search | Modern Data Stack | UK & European Recruitment