C&D Talent Advisory - Academy
Senior ML Engineer | London
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About The Company
Our Client is a venture-backed AI startup building a next-generation foundation model to enable fully autonomous software delivery for embedded control systems.
This is an opportunity to join at an early stage, work directly with the founders, and help shape a technology designed to redefine how software is built, optimized, and deployed.
Location: London, United Kingdom (Remote with monthly office visits, ideally onsite)
Employment Type: Full-time
Level: Mid-Senior Level
Compensation: £100,000-£150,000 + Equity (Share Options)
Work Authorization: Existing UK work authorization required
About The Role
We're looking for a Senior Machine Learning Engineer (Foundation Models) to lead the development, optimisation, and production deployment of our next-generation foundation model.
This is a deeply technical, hands-on role where you'll architect large-scale ML systems, optimise distributed training and inference, build GPU-accelerated infrastructure, and work directly with founders to solve complex engineering challenges.
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If you're excited by cutting-edge AI research, production-scale machine learning, and building systems that push the limits of modern deep learning, we'd love to hear from you.
What You'll Do
Foundation Model Development:
- Lead the research, development, and deployment of large-scale foundation models
- Define long-term technical strategy for high-performance ML systems
- Build scalable training and inference infrastructure
- Own model quality, performance, and reliability
ML Infrastructure & Optimisation:
- Optimise distributed training and inference pipelines
- Design GPU-accelerated systems, including custom CUDA kernels when needed
- Profile and optimise data pipelines, training loops, inference, and deployment
- Build internal tooling, benchmarking systems, and evaluation frameworks
Architecture & Collaboration:
- Design scalable ML infrastructure and solution architectures
- Evaluate and implement state-of-the-art ML technologies
- Work closely with founders to translate product goals into technical roadmaps
- Drive engineering excellence across the ML platform
What We're Looking For
Must Have:
- Extensive experience designing and building large-scale foundation models
- Strong Python and CUDA C/C++ expertise
- Deep knowledge of PyTorch (preferred) or another major deep learning framework
- Experience optimising and debugging deep learning models
- Experience with distributed training and large-scale inference
- Experience building ML systems on AWS, Azure, or GCP
- Strong GPU optimisation experience
- Experience building production ML infrastructure
- Excellent system design skills
- Delivery-focused mindset with strong ownership
- Comfortable solving ambiguous, high-impact problems
- Able to work onsite in London or visit the office at least once per month
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Nice to Have:
- Experience with Mixture of Experts (MoE) or State Space Models
- Custom CUDA kernel development
- ML systems operating under strict production SLOs
- Experience building internal ML tooling and benchmarking frameworks
- Startup or research lab experience shipping foundation models
- Experience scaling distributed GPU clusters
What We Offer
- £100,000-£150,000 salary
- Meaningful equity (Share Options)
- Opportunity to build a first-of-its-kind foundation model
- Direct collaboration with founders
- No take-home assignments or live coding interviews
- Transparent, low-ego engineering culture
- High ownership and technical autonomy
- Office-first environment with flexibility for exceptional candidates
If you want to help build the next generation of foundation models and solve some of the hardest ML problems in production, we'd love to hear from you...
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