Principal Machine Learning Engineer

Altana is the world’s first Value Chain Management System, a collaborative, public-private network that enables customers to take command of their extended supplier and distribution networks from raw material origins to the sale of finished products. By applying artificial intelligence to the world’s largest body of supply chain data, Altana reveals these previously opaque global networks and powers workflows across them. Customers like Boston Scientific, L.L.Bean, Maersk, US Customs and Border Protection, and the UK Department of Business and Trade use Altana to build secure, resilient, efficient, and sustainable global value chains.

We have built a fundamental understanding of how the world’s economy works, and the implications for global resiliency, sustainability and opportunity are enormous. Backed by leading investors and used by the world’s most important organizations, Altana’s mission is to power a new era of globalization organized around trusted value chain networks.

This is a lofty mission, and our success depends on building a diverse, global team and creating an environment in which they can thrive. We operate in accordance with our values: we embrace reality as we work to change it; we focus on value creation, not capture; we foster diversity and embrace difference; and, we go on offense. When you join Altana, you’ll be joining a vibrant, collaborative team working together to solve complex problems with the potential for global societal impact.  

The Opportunity at Altana

The Engineering team is looking for talented Machine Learning Engineers to help build out our vision.  In this role, you’ll work with world-scale public and proprietary datasets pertaining to all aspects of global trade, build sophisticated Machine Learning models that generate unique insights for our customers into the risks and opportunities posed by their supply chains, and stay on the cutting edge by incorporating generative AI into supply chain exploration and analytics workflows. 

You Will 

• Develop, deploy and continuously improve machine learning models powering Altana’s classification, risk screening, network analysis, and entity resolution capabilities.  

• Build and maintain supportable, scalable and evolvable  machine learning pipelines

• Work in a cross-functional team with software engineers, data scientists and product managers to generate new business ideas and enhance our product offerings.

• Evaluate and recommend new tools, technologies, and best practices for machine learning development and deployment

• Keep up-to-date with the latest advancements in machine learning and artificial intelligence to stay current on emerging techniques and trends  

About You

• BS  degree in Computer Science, Data Science, or equivalent experience

• Passionate about applying SOTA ML techniques to solve real world applied problems and willingness to get your hands dirty in the data and domain to achieve measurable outcomes

• 10 + years of professional experience as a data scientist or machine learning engineer with proven track record of delivering functional product oriented ML solutions 

• Extensive experience with Python Machine Learning toolset (Tensorflow, PyTorch, Scikit-learn, Numpy, Pandas)

• Proven track record of ownership and delivery of projects with major organizational impact

• You care deeply about engineering excellence, supportability and knowledge-sharing 

• You have strong written and verbal communication skills

• You are curious, always learning, and keep a close eye on latest developments in the fields of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence

Nice to have, but not required

• Prior experience building and tuning large language models (Bert, LLaMA, or similar)

• Familiarity with prompt engineering and chain-of-thought prompting for LLMs 

• Experience in multi-modal ML on text and images, and text and structured features

• Working knowledge of cloud services like AWS, Azure, or GCP

Technologies we love

• Languages: Python, Spark

• Tools: Docker, Git, Kubernetes, Swagger/OpenAPI, AWS, Azure

• Datastores: Databricks, Elasticsearch, Postgres, ArangoDB

• ML Tools: Tensorflow, PyTorch, Keras, FAISS

This role can be based in any of our Altana hub locations, with hybrid work flexibility: New York City; Boston, MA: Washington D.C.; London, UK; San Francisco, CA

Why it’s great to work at Altana

• We love to collaborate, and we win as a team!
• We are committed to engineering excellence
• We value personal and professional development
• We learn from diverse backgrounds and perspectives
• We impact the world, from enabling developing countries to identifying drug traffickers

At Altana, we believe that a diverse workforce enables greater creativity, performance, and adaptability. We’re proud to be an equal opportunity employer and welcome you to join us as you are. Our employment opportunities and decisions are based on business needs and individual qualifications, without regard to race, color, religious creed, national origin, ancestry, age, physical or mental disability, medical condition, marital status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, genetic information, family care or medical leave status, military or veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by the laws or regulations in the areas in which we operate. We prohibit discrimination and harassment of any type, in any situation.