[Hiring] Senior Applied AI/ML Scientist @Sprout Social

Role Description

NewsWhip by Sprout Social is looking for a Senior Applied AI/ML Scientist to join its AI, Data and Intelligence Business Unit.

Why join NewsWhip by Sprout Social’s Data Science and AI team? Most LLM applications are wrappers around a chat box. Ours aren't. NewsWhip processes the world's news in real time - millions of articles, posts, and signals every day - and turns that firehose into predictive intelligence that journalists, PR leaders, and global brands rely on to make decisions before the news breaks.

The interesting problems live everywhere in that pipeline:

• Ambient agents that monitor and enrich content as it flows in.
• Retrieval systems that have to be fast and correct on a corpus that changes by the minute.
• Evaluation frameworks for a domain where hallucination has real-world consequences.
• Reporting workflows where LLM-generated insights need to stand up to scrutiny by professional analysts.

You'll work at the intersection of product, data, and engineering with the autonomy to make architectural decisions and the support of a company that takes AI quality seriously. If you want to build LLM systems that do more than answer questions - systems that reason, retrieve, enrich, and act across one of the most demanding content domains there is — this is the role.

Qualifications

• 6+ years of experience building and operating production software systems.
• 2+ years hands-on experience shipping LLM-powered features in real-world applications.
• Strong backend engineering skills (Python preferred).
• Experience with several of the following:
  • Large Language Model APIs (OpenAI, Anthropic, open-weight models, etc.) and transformer-based techniques.
  • Embedding models and similarity search.
  • Vector databases (ChromaDB, Pinecone, Weaviate, etc.).
  • Prompt engineering and structured output techniques.
  • LLM evaluation frameworks and automated testing.
  • LLMOps practices (monitoring, versioning, observability using Langfuse, Datadog, etc.).
• Track record of owning a system end-to-end in production, not just contributing to one.
• Experience making and defending architectural trade-offs (model choice, build vs. buy, latency vs. quality).
• Experience mentoring engineers or leading technical design reviews.
• Experience working closely with Product and UX on feature delivery.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s in Data Science, Computer Science, Machine Learning, AI, or a related discipline.
• Experience with AI orchestration frameworks (LangChain, LlamaIndex, LangGraph, etc.).
• Familiarity with Model Context Protocol (MCP) or tool-calling architectures.
• Experience building agentic workflows or tool-using systems.
• Knowledge of semantic search and content retrieval systems.
• Experience with cloud platforms.
• Background in media analytics, content intelligence, or large-scale text processing.
• Experience in startup or high-growth environments.

Benefits

• Comprehensive Private Health & Dental: 100% premium coverage for you and your eligible dependents through VHI (Health) and DeCare (Dental).
• Pension Scheme: We match your pension contributions 1-to-1 up to 6% of your salary.
• Life & Disability Insurance: 100% paid-for life cover and disability insurance for your peace of mind.
• Generous Paid Time Off: 25 days of leave, plus all public holidays and additional company-wide Rest & Recharge days.
• Paid Parental Leave: 26 weeks of full pay for birthing parents and 16 weeks of full pay for non-birthing parents.
• Family & Care Support: Access to subsidized child/eldercare through Care.com.
• Premium Mental Health Support: Full access to Modern Health for you and your dependents, including free coaching, therapy sessions, and digital wellness resources.
• Lifestyle Spending Account (LSA): An annual $700 USD fund to spend on your physical, mental, and financial well-being.
• Work From Home Support: A one-time $550 USD stipend to set up your home office, plus a monthly $50 USD stipend for internet.
• Dublin Office Perks: A €18 daily lunch stipend (via Deliveroo) when you work from our Dublin office.
• Commuter Savings: Access to the Tax Saver Commuter/Cycle to Work scheme for tax savings.
• Charitable Giving: A company match for your donations to eligible organizations.