AI/ML Engineering Lead

As a trusted global transformation partner, Welocalize accelerates the global business journey by enabling brands and companies to reach, engage, and grow international audiences. Welocalize delivers multilingual content transformation services in translation, localization, and adaptation for over 250 languages with a growing network of over 400,000 in-country linguistic resources. Driving innovation in language services, Welocalize delivers high-quality training data transformation solutions for NLP-enabled machine learning by blending technology and human intelligence to collect, annotate, and evaluate all content types. Our team works across locations in North America, Europe, and Asia serving our global clients in the markets that matter to them. www.welocalize.com

To perform this job successfully, an individual must be able to perform each essential duty satisfactorily. The requirements listed below are representative of the knowledge, skill, and/or ability required. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions.

Job Reference: #LI-JC1

The AI/ML Research and Development Engineering Lead is responsible for leading a team of engineers in developing production-grade AI based systems. This role focuses on applying cutting edge AI research to real-world problems, designing scalable and maintainable systems, and ensuring high engineering standards across the ML stack. The lead will collaborate closely with product, platform, and data teams to ensure end-to-end delivery of AI-powered solutions. The emphasis is on engineering excellence, robustness, and impact.

Tasks and Responsibilities::
• Lead a team of AI/ML engineers to design, build, test, and maintain production AI systems.
• Own the end-to-end AI model lifecycle, including data ingestion, feature engineering, model training, evaluation, deployment, and monitoring.
• Set and enforce software engineering best practices for ML codebases (testing, code reviews, documentation, CI/CD, versioning).
• Architect scalable and reliable AI services and pipelines that integrate with existing backend and platform infrastructure.
• Collaborate with product, data, and platform teams to translate business requirements into robust AI-driven solutions.
• Ensure models in production are observable, debuggable, and maintainable (metrics, logging, alerts, retraining strategies).
• Mentor engineers on Python best practices, system design, and production AI patterns.
• Stay up to date with industry trends in ML engineering, MLOps, and applied ML, and assess their practical applicability.

Requirements::
• Degree (preferably Master's) in Computer Science, AI, or a related engineering field.
• 7+ years of experience in software engineering.
• Significant production ownership of AI-based systems.
• Proven experience leading and mentoring engineers in a production-focused environment.
• Strong expertise in Python, with a deep understanding of clean code, testing, packaging, and performance considerations.
• Solid understanding of ML fundamentals (training, evaluation, bias/variance, metrics) with a pragmatic, application-driven mindset.
• Experience designing and operating ML pipelines and services (batch and/or real-time).
• Familiarity with MLOps practices: model versioning, CI/CD, monitoring, rollback strategies, and reproducibility.
• Strong communication skills, with the ability to align technical decisions with product and business goals.
• Experience in working with cross-functional teams to bring research into production.