[Hiring] Machine Learning Lead @Social Discovery Group

Role Description

We are looking for a Machine Learning Lead. Your main tasks will be:

• Own the ML strategy for dialogue systems: decide what to build and in what order, and tie those bets to business metrics (ARPU, retention, chat depth).
• Lead a team of 3 ML engineers — set the technical bar, distribute work, hire and let go, grow the people you keep.
• Drive LLM post-training and model adaptation end to end: SFT, LoRA/QLoRA, preference optimization (DPO / ORPO / SimPO / GRPO), dataset construction.
• Design agent harnesses and tool-using LLM systems: tool calling, structured outputs, routing, retries, memory and context, guardrails.
• Build the evaluation layer: offline and pairwise evals, LLM-as-a-judge, regression suites that actually correlate with A/B outcomes.
• Cut dialogue failure modes — loops, contradictions, persona drift, context loss, generic replies — and keep inference efficient on latency and cost per message.
• Stay hands-on where it matters (roughly 10–20% of your time): prototypes, debugging agent traces, reviewing your team's work.

Qualifications

• Technical degree and a real ML engineering background — you have trained and shipped models yourself, not only managed people who do.
• Experience leading a team of 3–5 ML engineers, including hiring and performance decisions.
• Expert-level Python, solid understanding of transformer architecture and modern LLM behavior, hands-on with training, fine-tuning and evaluation.
• Production experience with LLM systems: APIs, streaming, batching, fallbacks, cost/latency trade-offs, observability over traces and transcripts.
• Ability to read fresh research and turn it into a prototype, an eval and a shipped change with measurable impact.
• Fluent Russian, ready to work in CET (±2) hours.

Requirements

• Nice to have: experience beyond text (computer vision, image generation, multimodal), long-running conversations and character consistency, vLLM / TGI / SGLang, DeepSpeed / FSDP / Accelerate, quantization, safety classifiers.

Benefits

• REMOTE OPPORTUNITY to work full-time.
• The initial pay level or pay range for this role will be shared with candidates during the recruitment process and before the commencement of employment.
• Vacation: 28 calendar days per year.
• 7 wellness days per year (time off) that can be used to deal with household issues, to lie down and recover without taking sick leave.
• Bonuses up to $5000 for recommending successful applicants for positions in the company.
• 50% payment for professional training, international conferences, and meetings.
• Corporate discount for English lessons.
• Health benefits: If you are not eligible for corporate medical insurance, the company will compensate you with up to $1,000 gross per year per employee for health insurance or doctor's fees for yourself and close relatives (spouse, children).
• Workplace organization: The company provides all employees with an equipped workplace and all the necessary equipment (table, armchair, wifi, etc.) in our offices or co-working locations. In other locations, the company provides reimbursement of workplace costs up to $1000 gross once every 3 years.
• Internal gamified gratitude system: receive bonuses from colleagues and exchange them for our merchandise, team building activities, massage certificates, etc.