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Lead Machine Learning Engineer
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Lead Machine Learning Engineer
We’re recruiting on behalf of a large, well-established retail group. Its central AI team builds machine learning products in-house for use across the group, and is behind some of the business’s most important and high-profile initiatives, with significant investment going into building and scaling in-house capability. The team has grown quickly over the last few years and is still growing.
What the role involves
You’ll join as a Lead Machine Learning Engineer, working on in-house models that shape how products are priced, promoted and marked down across the group. These are commercially critical products with real visibility, and the work feeds straight into decisions that affect millions of customers.
This is a true player-coach role. Expect to spend roughly half your time hands-on, writing and reviewing production code. The rest is leadership:
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- Owning the technical direction of your workstream, including model design, solution architecture and engineering approach
- Making decisions and working closely with commercial and product stakeholders
- Turning business problems into clearly scoped technical solutions, and explaining results and uncertainty to non-technical audiences
- Line managing and developing a team of ML Engineers through coaching, performance and planning
- Setting high standards for engineering quality, and championing good ML practice across the wider AI function
ML Engineers here own their work end to end, from modelling through to production, supported by dedicated platform, data and MLOps engineers. It’s a space where you’ll be building and tuning your own models rather than wrapping an API. The culture is collaborative, with a strong emphasis on knowledge sharing and continuous improvement.
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What we’re looking for
- Strong hands-on experience with classical ML, particularly tree-based methods
- Experience with time-series problems: forecasting, demand modelling or similar
- A track record of putting ML into production, with sound views on architecture and system design
- Strong Python and SQL across the full ML lifecycle
- Experience leading engineers, and a genuine interest in the leadership side of the role
- Comfortable working with non-technical stakeholders across a project with several moving parts
Bonus: pricing, elasticity or markdown experience (valuable but not essential)
Cloud experience on any major platform
This is based in London on a hybrid basis.
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