Principal Machine Learning Engineer - Chat

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About Cleo

Most people come to Cleo to do work that matters. Every day, we empower people to build a life beyond their next paycheck, building a beloved AI that enables you to forge your own path toward financial well-being.

Backed by Tier 1 investors, we’ve reached millions of people to support them throughout their financial lives, from their first paycheck to their first home and beyond. We're hitting headlines too. This year, Forbes named us as one of their Next Billion Dollar Startups, and we were crowned the 'Hottest Tech Scaleup' at the Europas.

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About the role

Machine Learning Engineers at Cleo work on building novel solutions to real-world problems. This really does vary but could be: creating chatbots to coach our users around their financial health, creating classifiers to better understand transaction data or even optimising transactions within our payments platform. 

Ultimately, we’re looking for a brilliant Principal Machine Learning Engineer to join us on our mission to fight for the world's financial health. You’ll be leading technical work within a team of adaptable, creative and product-focused engineers, who train & integrate cutting edge machine learning across a variety of products and deploy them into production for millions of users. We understand our customers, we understand their pain, and we are passionate about helping them.

What you’ll be doing

• Training and fine-tuning models to solve customer problems across our chatbot and the bank transaction data behind it.
• Deploying these models into our production environments using our in-house ML platform, which you can read about on our blog: Let's have an Espresso: MLOps at Cleo. Or integrate with LLMs hosted by OpenAI, Anthropic, GCP, AWS and others.
• Working cross-functionally with backend engineers, data analysts, UX writers, product managers, annotation teams, and others to ship features that improve our users’ financial health.
• Taking the initiative to propose & lead technical work towards problems that were previously unknown or poorly understood. Driving change at the pillar and chapter level that affects multiple squads.
• Keeping Cleo at the forefront of NLP by driving the adoption of appropriate state-of-the-art techniques and communicating the team’s successes and learnings at the company level & beyond.
• Mentoring & advising colleagues on their choices of models, architecture, and evaluation, promoting best practices for how we use LLMs.

Here are some examples, big and small, of the kinds of product feature work our ML Engineers have taken part in over the last year:

• Building AI Agents to explore and derive insights from users transactional data
• Developed deeper understanding of users finances through models extracting meaning from transactional data. Think about your bank statement, how often do you not know what a transaction is?
• Developed contextual intent classifiers to understand what conversations users are having with Cleo, enabling control of how Cleo should respond
• Building ML models to understand the actions that users have available to them in Cleo and provide those contextually in conversations
• Built ML models to understand the risk of customers using bank transaction features and user activity
• Built models to optimise the payment success for our customers and optimising the costs for the business. Think of this as a two-sided optimisation problem.

Whatever problem you tackle, and whichever team you join, your work will directly impact those most in need, helping to improve their financial health.

What you’ll need

• Experience in industry machine learning roles as a technical leader or principal/staff engineer
• Excellent knowledge of both Data Science (python, SQL) and production tools
• A deep understanding of probability and statistics fundamentals
• Big picture thinking to correctly diagnose problems and productionising research
• Top tier communication skills, to be able to partner with Product and Commercial Leaders
• Industry-leading contributions to your field, communicated through conferences, blogs, talks, or open-source projects

Nice to have

• Advanced Degree in a quantitative discipline
• Strong experience with additional programming languages, such as Java, Scala, C++
• Broader contributions to your field through: conferences, blogs, talks, or open-source projects.

What do you get for all your hard work?

• A competitive compensation package (base + equity) with bi-annual reviews. You can view our public progression framework and salary bandings here: https://cleo-ai.progressionapp.com/ - This position is a DS5 level and we can pay £111,184 - £145,088 p.a depending on experience.
• Work at one of the fastest-growing tech startups, backed by top VC firms, Balderton & EQT Ventures
• A clear progression plan. We want you to keep growing. That means trying new things, leading others, challenging the status quo and owning your impact. Always with our complete support.
• Flexibility: We can’t fight for the world’s financial health if we’re not healthy ourselves. We work with everyone to make sure they have the balance they need to do their best work
• Work where you work best. We’re a globally distributed team. If you live in London we have a hybrid approach, we’d love you to spend one day a week or more in our beautiful office. If you’re outside of London, we’ll encourage you to spend a couple of days with us a few times per year. And we’ll cover your travel costs, naturally.
• Other benefits;
• 25 days annual leave a year + public holidays (+ an additional day for every year you spend at Cleo)
• 401k matching in the US and 6% employer-matched pension in the UK
• Private Medical Insurance
• Private Dental Insurance
• 1 month paid sabbatical after 4 years at Cleo!
• Online courses & internal training to level up your skills
• Regular socials and activities, online and in-person
• Online mental health support via Spill
• And many more!

UK App access: The Cleo app is no longer downloadable in the UK (but only until next year). If you’re an existing user, you’ll still have access to the app. But some features won’t be available (just for a little while). Why? 99% of our users are based in the US – where financial health is often overlooked. We’ve decided to shift our focus to where we can provide the most value and make the greatest impact for users who need it most. Then we’ll be able to apply what we learn to better support our UK users in the future.