Senior Applied Machine learning Engineer

Job Description

Job DescriptionWe deliver technology to some of the best startups and companies in the world through diverse empowered teams of technologists that want to create change in the digital world.

Athenaworks was created to be a safe place for all people from all areas of life. A place where teams are gender-balanced and compensated equally. And a place where careers are unrestrained regardless of cultural, educational, or geographical background.

We value people with strong technical skills that are collaborative, curious, results-driven, and take ownership. We embrace people that want to be themselves, have daily flexibility, grow, learn, and make a difference wherever the opportunity presents itself.

So we hope this sounds like you. Because we are always looking for exceptional Senior Applied Machine learning Engineer to work in immersive client projects that will challenge your abilities. This position requires:

Role Overview

We are seeking a senior-level engineer to design and deliver intelligent automation capabilities for large-scale document review workflows governed by strict privacy and compliance requirements. This role focuses on applying machine learning, computer vision, and natural language techniques to understand, classify, and transform complex document sets within an established data and processing pipeline. This role includes large-scale text analytics and document intelligence across millions of scanned pages. You will design systems to identify structural and semantic similarities, group related documents, detect recurring content patterns, and surface trends across similar document collections. The work requires building scalable clustering, embedding, and pattern-discovery pipelines that transform unstructured and semi-structured page-level data into actionable insights.

You will work hands-on with high-volume, heterogeneous document collections to improve accuracy, consistency, and throughput of privacy-driven review processes. The work emphasizes practical outcomes, explainability, and operational reliability over experimental or research-only approaches.

Key Responsibilities

• Analyze large document collection to detect trends, anomalies, and emergent patterns that inform automation strategy and compliance workflows.

• Design and implement machine learning solutions that analyze scanned and born-digital documents to support automated privacy and compliance decisions

• Leverage existing structured signals (such as spatial coordinates, annotations, and metadata) to discover repeatable document patterns and reusable automation opportunities

• Develop classification and detection models that improve document understanding, including content type recognition and metadata validation

• Apply computer vision techniques to locate visually significant elements within documents, such as signatures, forms, images, or sensitive regions

• Build and tune text-based models to identify and interpret sensitive information across diverse document formats and quality levels

• Create decisioning logic that distinguishes between documents requiring review and those eligible for automated pass-through

• Integrate models and services into production-grade pipelines with attention to performance, scale, auditability, and failure handling

• Collaborate closely with platform, data, and domain experts to ensure solutions align with operational realities and regulatory expectations

• Monitor, evaluate, and continuously improve model performance using real-world feedback and downstream outcomes

Required Skills & Experience

• Strong background in applied machine learning with real-world production deployments

• Hands-on experience with document analysis, document classification, or document understanding systems

• Proficiency in computer vision techniques for layout analysis, object detection, and region identification

• Solid grounding in text processing and natural language techniques for entity detection, pattern recognition, and content classification

• Experience working with noisy or imperfect inputs such as scanned documents, OCR output, or legacy data

• Ability to translate ambiguous business or compliance requirements into measurable technical outcomes

• Strong software engineering skills, including versioned deployments, testing, and maintainability of ML systems

• Comfort working with large datasets and iterating on models based on empirical results rather than theoretical perfection

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in regulated or compliance-driven domains (privacy, legal, healthcare, government, or similar)

• Familiarity with spatial or layout-aware document representations

• Experience building systems that support explainability, traceability, and audit requirements

• Exposure to hybrid approaches that combine rules, heuristics, and learned models

• Ability to reason about tradeoffs between precision, recall, automation rate, and operational risk

A happy team makes a huge difference, that's why we provide:

• Payment in USD or in your local currency

• A truly flexible work schedule

• Holiday and performance bonuses

• An excellent paid time off policy

• 4 free Udemy courses a year

• Home exercise & wellness membership

• An opportunity for you to help create change in the industry

• And more!

ATHENAWORKS is an inclusive safe organization that only considers your technical ability, work experience, ability to collaborate, your capacity to grow to the next level of your career, and ability to deliver great work. This means that we also embrace/welcome self-taught people as well! We will NEVER consider any other personal or professional aspects of your life. We hope that you choose to have a conversation with us today and find out what makes us different from any company that you have experienced.