Senior Machine Learning Engineer at Ground News Kitchener, ON

Senior Machine Learning Engineer job at Ground News. Kitchener, ON. Who We Are?

Ground News is a platform that makes it easy to compare news sources, read between the lines of media bias and break free from algorithms.

In a world where political polarization and media distrust are at an all-time high, Ground News offers people a better way to stay informed and open-minded. Our mobile app, web app, and browser extension are home to a community of mindful newsreaders who use our news comparison platform to easily see every side of a story and engage with news beyond their filter bubble.

Unlike most news companies, our audience and our values do not align with any specific political ideology. Unlike most tech platforms, we don’t use manipulative algorithms to keep users on our platform to sell more ads. We are supported by our readers who pay for a subscription to build a more nuanced understanding of the news, the world, and themselves. • #1 on Product Hunt (Oct 19, '20), #2 (Nov 17, '21), #2 (Mar 26, '21) • Techstars portfolio company • Winner of Digital News Innovation Challenge by Facebook • Winner of Mobile Apps Showdown at CES • Featured at Mobile World Congress • Featured on New York Times, Financial Times, Newsmax, Forbes and more • Our site has even been retweeted by the POTUS

The Opportunity - Senior Machine Learning Engineer

We're looking for someone who can get excited about building tools to help people navigate and understand the vast news/information ecosystem we live in. As part of the team, you will be at the forefront of pioneering new AI applications, tailored for the news landscape. You will be pushing the limit on what Large Language Models can do, with access to rich data sets consisting of 60,000+ articles ingested per day from over 50,000 news sources.

What You’ll Do • Design and implement advanced prompt engineering techniques to coax the best outputs from different LLMs. This will involve experimenting with and benchmarking various generative models • Design and maintain a scalable infrastructure for new AI-powered features and products while working closely with Full-Stack and DevOps engineers • Design and build out a series of internal ML products, including spam detectors, clustering algorithms, and recommendation engines. • Apply non-LLM ML frameworks (i.e. vector search, knowledge graphs) to existing products • Build data pipelines for a very large news-specific dataset expanding in real time • Prepare and use data for various applications including ML, client use and analytics

What You’ll Have • 7+ years of proven hands-on experience in developing, deploying, and maintaining ML/NLP models and pipelines including entity analysis, sentiment analysis, similarity and salience • Strong understanding of Knowledge Graphs, and libraries (i.e. Neo4j, AWS Kendra, etc.) • A minimum of 6 months experience working with the RAG Framework • A minimum of 6 months of hands-on experience with Large Language Models (Open AI/Llama2/MistralBERT / GPT), prompt engineering and LLM deployment • A minimum of 2 years experience in model finetuning (LoRA, etc.) • Hand-on experience on Semantic search pipeline , Information Retrieval concepts and Document Indexing • Experience with Elasticsearch, Typescript, NodeJS • Must exhibit a deep understanding of modern AWS Data stack and agile delivery models, demonstrated focus on building business data pipelines • Warehousing experience preferably with Snowflake and/or Redshift • Experience with AWS Glue, AWS Redshift,AWS EC2, Lambda, S3 for ETL and Catalog, Datasync, Parquet files • Experience in SQL and Query optimisation • Expertise in programming languages such as Python, Go and ML/NLP libraries such as PyTorch, Pyspark

What You Might Have • A deep curiosity and interest in the political system, and the relationship between tech and media • Experience using any of Ground News’ products (app, website, extension, newsletters)

Why Work at Ground News?

Co-founded by a former NASA engineer and Bain consultant, a position with Ground News provides an unparalleled learning experience both personally and professionally. At Ground, we prioritize growth: both for our business and team members. You’ll have the freedom to work remotely and play a key role in the development of Ground News products.

This is an opportunity to work with a growing and mighty team that is fighting every day to build a world where cooperative, civil debate is the norm, media is accountable, and critical thought is the baseline of our information consumption. Ground is based in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada, but this role is remote.

Ground news takes pride in being a harassment- and discrimination-free space for everyone, regardless of age, disability, ethnicity, gender identity or expression, nationality, neurotype, personal appearance, political affiliation, professional background, race, religion, or sexual identity or orientation. Our culture is one of collaboration, creativity, and diverse perspectives. We are committed to building and fostering an inclusive, accessible environment for everyone. If you have any questions, concerns, or requests regarding accessibility needs, please contact [email protected] , and a member of our team will be happy to help.

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