Staff Data Scientist - Natural Language Processing

We're hiring a Data Scientist focused on natural language processing to build models that turn unstructured text into product features and business insight. You'll own problems end-to-end — framing, data, modeling, evaluation, and shipping — and work closely with engineering and product to put your work in front of users.

What you'll do

• Design and train NLP models for tasks like classification, entity extraction, retrieval, summarization, and semantic search
• Fine-tune and evaluate LLMs (open-source and API-based); build RAG pipelines and agentic workflows where appropriate
• Build robust evaluation harnesses — offline metrics, human-in-the-loop review, and online A/B tests
• Partner with ML engineers to productionize models (latency, cost, monitoring, drift detection)
• Turn ambiguous product questions into well-scoped ML problems and communicate tradeoffs clearly to non-technical stakeholders

What we're looking for

• 3+ years of applied ML experience with a meaningful portion in NLP
• Strong Python and the modern NLP stack: PyTorch or JAX, Hugging Face Transformers, spaCy, sentence-transformers
• Hands-on experience fine-tuning transformer models (LoRA/QLoRA, instruction tuning, preference optimization) and/or building production RAG systems
• Solid grounding in evaluation: knows the difference between BLEU/ROUGE/BERTScore/LLM-as-judge and when each is misleading
• Comfortable with SQL, vector databases (pgvector, Pinecone, Weaviate, or similar), and one major cloud (AWS/GCP/Azure)
• Clear written and verbal communication; can defend a modeling choice and also admit when a heuristic beats a model

Nice to have

• Publications at ACL/EMNLP/NAACL/NeurIPS or strong open-source contributions
• Experience with multilingual NLP, speech, or multimodal models
• Background shipping LLM features in a regulated domain (healthcare, finance, legal)

What We Offer

• Work from anywhere in the US! Machinify is digital-first.
• Top Medical/Dental/Vision offerings
• FSA/HSA
• Tuition reimbursement
• Competitive salary, 401(k) with company match
• Unlimited PTO
• Additional health and wellness benefits and perks
• Flexible and trusting environment where you’ll feel empowered to do your best work

The salary for this position is based on an array of factors unique to each candidate: Such as years and depth of experience, set skills, certifications, etc. We are hiring for different levels and the base salary can range from $180k-$230k+ based on your assessed level. Compensation also includes meaningful equity, healthcare, unlimited PTO, and more.