Machine Learning Engineer

Position description

The team at ICIJ is small but highly ambitious, creative, energetic and passionate about our mission: producing investigative journalism with global impact. We value team-players who are willing to go beyond the duties on their job description to collaborate with others. ICIJ prides itself on supporting each employee to achieve their full potential.

ICIJ is dedicated to building a culturally diverse and pluralistic staff committed to teaching and working in a multicultural environment. Qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment and will not be discriminated against based on race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity/expression, national origin, disability status, protected veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law.

Machine Learning Engineer

We are looking for a qualified Machine Learning (ML) Engineer to join ICIJ’s technology team, working closely with our ML engineer in coordination with full stack and system engineers as well as a UX/UI designer. This is a full-time position on a 12-month contract.

With the help of your teammates, you will be responsible for designing, building and shipping ML related tasks and pipelines for processing from a large amount of documents through our open source software Datashare. Datashare ML pipelines cover a wide range of ML topics spanning Natural Language Understanding (NLU), computer vision and speech-processing with privacy, quality and scalability in mind.

We use vision algorithms in Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to extract text from documents, to detect passports in scanned documents, or to understand document layouts and better extract their content. We plan to leverage Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) to transcribe various audio and video files. We use NLU to extract entities from documents and plan to perform entity resolution between documents. We intend to improve document search and retrieval, potentially using leveraging graphs and vector-embeddings.

ICIJ’s tech team collaborates with academic partners on cutting-edge ML topics; as an ML engineer you will also be actively involved in R&D projects.

During the first weeks of the onboarding, you’ll discover the organization structure, the development environment and the different ICIJ platforms. Then, you will design and implement an ML task to implement, assisted by our ML engineer.

This is a full time position either remote or based in our office in Paris (France). As our tech team is primarily located in Europe, this position is expected to maintain a working schedule that is close to regular European office hours.

Qualifications

Essential skills and experience

• Comfortable with the full ML feature lifecycle: ML problem framing, ML experimentation, ML pipeline implementation, deployment, monitoring and maintenance
• Understands ML theory and algorithms applied to NLU/NLP, speech/audio, and/or vision, and strong data analysis skills
• Comfortable with software architecture design and engineering of backend services and devops
• Familiar with popular ML libraries (torch, sklearn, transformers…)
• Proficient in Python programming (and testing!)
• Not allergic to Java
• Professional working proficiency in written and spoken English

Preferred skills

• Experienced with resource-efficient ML: ML at large scale (elastic processing, k8s…), hardware resource-constrained ML, alternatives to LLMs
• Familiar with task workflow frameworks (Prefect, Airflow, Dagster…)
• Debugging skills and interest in QA
• Experienced with backend languages (Java, Scala, Go, Rust…)
• Experience with Docker and devops tools
• Experience with journalism and data analysis for reporting
• Open to collaborate with non experts or partners (journalists or academia)

Don’t hesitate to apply even if you don’t meet every requirement, we value potential and motivation.

Application instructions

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