Machine Learning Engineer

Job Description

What you’ll do

• Build, fine-tune, and deploy OCR and handwriting-recognition models for noisy, real-world student work across a wide range of ages and writing styles.
• Work with vision-language models (VLMs) for end-to-end document understanding—reading handwriting, preserving layout and structure, and handling edge cases that traditional OCR pipelines miss.
• Fine-tune and align models using techniques such as supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning (e.g. TRL), and run experiments to push recognition accuracy on our hardest cases.
• Continuously improve the model. Run a steady cadence of experiments, ship incremental gains, and close the loop between real production usage and the next round of training.
• Make models smaller, faster, and cheaper. Apply quantisation, distillation, pruning, and inference optimisation to cut latency and cost while holding or improving accuracy—so we can process entire class sets in minutes at scale.
• Design and own evaluation. Define the metrics that matter (character/word error rate, normalised edit distance, layout and structure fidelity, downstream feedback quality), build robust eval sets that reflect the diversity of real student writing, and create the harnesses and dashboards that make model quality measurable and regression-proof.
• Lead the labelling team. Own data quality as the primary driver of model improvement: set annotation guidelines, define what gets labelled and why, manage throughput and quality, and build the tooling and feedback loops (including active learning) that turn labelling effort into measurable model gains.
• Collaborate with the broader engineering team to take models from prototype to reliable production services.
• Monitor models in production, diagnose failure modes, and feed what you learn back into both training and labelling priorities.

What we’re looking for

• Strong applied machine learning experience, with a focus on computer vision and/or OCR/document AI.
• Solid understanding of vision-language models and how to use, fine-tune, and evaluate them.
• Hands-on experience with OCR—either training/fine-tuning recognition models or building production OCR pipelines—ideally including handwriting.
• Experience fine-tuning and aligning models, including familiarity with libraries such as Hugging Face TRL and the broader Transformers/PyTorch ecosystem.
• Experience making models efficient for production—quantisation, distillation, pruning, or inference optimisation—and reasoning about accuracy/latency/cost trade-offs.
• A genuine instinct for evaluation: you believe you can’t improve what you can’t measure, and you’ve built metrics and eval pipelines before.
• Experience directing data annotation or labelling efforts, and a clear view of how data quality translates into model quality.
• Strong Python and software engineering fundamentals, with experience shipping ML to production.
• Comfort working with ambiguous, messy real-world data rather than clean benchmarks.

Nice to have

• Experience with handwriting recognition specifically, or with low-resource / domain-specific OCR.
• Experience building data annotation tooling, active-learning loops, or managing a labelling team.
• Familiarity with model serving and inference optimisation at scale (e.g. vLLM, or similar).
• An interest in education and the impact of getting this right for students and teachers.

Are you interested in this position?
Apply by clicking on the “Apply Now” button below!
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