Senior AI Translation Engineer (NLP)

About Smartcat

Smartcat is building the future of work, where human expertise meets digital teammates to drive 10x to 1000x productivity gains for the world’s leading enterprises.

We’re on the frontier of an entirely new category: Agentic AI. We enable enterprises to build high-performing hybrid workforces made up of both humans and AI agents. These AI agents aren’t generic copilots. They’re fully trained digital teammates that learn from your best people, your content, and your business strategy—ready to get to work from day one.

Our platform combines generative AI, human-in-the-loop workflows, and a living Enterprise Skill Graph that continuously learns and improves. Whether you're launching a product globally, onboarding new hires, translating learning content, or aligning legal teams across regions, Smartcat turns knowledge into action and action into scale.

Over 1,000 companies, including 20% of the Fortune 500, rely on Smartcat to bring their business to the world—instantly, accurately, and in every language. As a Series C company with 130% year-over-year growth, we’re scaling fast and investing in people who want to shape the future of work with us.

Join us in unlocking global potential, one human and agent team at a time.

Mission

As a AI Translation Engineer, you will be at the forefront of advancing our platform’s translation capabilities. Leveraging your expertise in machine learning including applied research, fine tuning, benchmarking, and inference optimization, you will deliver high-performance solutions that power critical features for our growing client base.

Requirements

• Evaluation engineering: Translates product features into measurable user use cases; selects a small set of reliable offline metrics; builds benchmarks and runs slice analysis across languages and domains; designs rubrics and reference-less MT evaluation for ambiguous cases; defines online metrics and guardrails, runs A/B tests and staged rollouts, and validates that offline gains translate into production impact while spotting metric loopholes and regressions

• Data fluency: Owns end-to-end dataset pipelines: multi-source ingestion → cleaning/validation → scalable multilingual datasets, with versioning and auditability

• Classical NLP foundations: Understands MT/search text normalization and core matching approaches (exact/fuzzy, typo tolerance, multi-word + overlap handling, tries/Aho–Corasick/inverted index basics), and applies them to improve preprocessing and retrieval

• LLM operations: Operates external LLM providers end-to-end: designs prompts for structured generation/evaluation; builds automated filters/validators; generates synthetic data at scale using self-consistency and multi-provider “consilium”; selects and routes across providers based on quality–latency–cost; and uses self-hosted models when helpful for quality analysis/judging and provider fine-tuning data prep

• Practical production engineering: Can write lightweight services/jobs when needed and ship them with structured logs, monitoring/alerts, reliability basics (retries, idempotency, fallbacks), and scalability considerations; collaborates effectively with Dev/Platform

Key Responsibilities

• Develop and improve benchmarks for translation problems

• Work with NER, word alignment, automatic translation quality scoring system, and other problems

• Set up infrastructure for self-hosted solutions

Our technologies

• ML/Backend: Python, C#, PyTorch, Transformers

• DB: MongoDB, PostgreSQL, Elasticsearch

• Messaging: Apache Kafka

• Cloud: Amazon AWS

• Monitoring: ELK, Prometheus, Grafana

Why joining Smartcat might be your best move so far

• Fully remote team
We are a global team of 200+ enthusiastic people spread across 30+ countries. We have been fully remote since 2020, with some locations populated with more Smartcaters than others, such as Boston, Belgrade, Lisbon, Tbilisi and Yerevan.

• Be part of an AI Native Organization
We are highly innovative, using AI across all areas of the organization to accelerate decision-making and free people to focus on strategy and high-impact work. We embrace new ideas and encourage all Smartcaters, regardless of level or department, to manage their own AI Agents. At Smartcat you’ll shape how AI transforms the workplace and play an integral role in ensuring Smartcat remains a leader in AI innovation.

• Innovating a $100 Billion industry
Smartcat is reshaping the $100B multilingual content industry with an AI-powered platform that makes it easy for companies to create, translate, and localize global content at scale. Our platform enables enterprise teams to move away from slow, traditional outsourcing methods, and achieve fast, high-quality results, at a fraction of the cost.

• Join the rocketship to scale-up 10x and beyond together
We are looking for someone to become an integral part of our team and play a crucial role in the most exciting part of our journey: transitioning from a post-Series C startup to a company exceeding $100M in ARR and $1B in valuation. Our journey isn’t for the faint of heart. We are growing at 130% YoY, thanks to our strong product-market fit and high-performing team, and plan to accelerate from here.

• Smartcat Culture: Where Diversity Meets High Performance
At Smartcat, we are committed to building a culture that highlights respect and appreciation for each individual's unique background and perspective, while maintaining a strong focus on results and engagement. We believe in welcoming everyone and fostering an inclusive environment where team members can be their authentic selves at work. Our commitment to inclusion is steadfast, and we stand firmly against discrimination and harassment.