Lead NLP Engineer

Job title:
Lead NLP Engineer

Reporting to:
Head of Labs

Location:
Edinburgh / Remote (within the UK)

Aveni is an award-winning technology company.
We use advanced AI to enable scalable efficiency for financial services companies, combining world-leading Natural Language Processing (NLP) expertise with deep financial services domain experience to drive enterprise-wide productivity.
Aveni uses conversational analytics to empower businesses to achieve exceptional productivity and compliance outcomes.

Purpose of the role

Aveni is in its high growth phase, and we currently have an excellent opportunity for a Lead NLP Engineer to join us to drive innovative projects forward and solve complex industry problems along the way.
Joining at an extremely exciting time for the business, this role will play a pivotal role in our ambition to deliver across multiple transformational projects.

Key responsibilities

We are looking for a Lead NLP Engineer to lead a project that will revolutionise the application of NLP within Financial Services in the UK.
Your main task will be leading a team of NLP engineers and Business Analysts, developing a reproducible data preparation, training and deployment pipeline for a family of Large Language Models which are focussed on solving problems from the Financial Services Industry.

The project will involve all aspects of developing an industry specific large language model, such as priority setting, data gathering, data cleaning, training, fine-tuning, alignment, evaluation, integration and deployment.
As the project lead, you will personally contribute to each of these tasks, and oversee a team of NLP engineers and business analysts, whilst ensuring that the tasks are completed to the highest standard and on time.

You will:

• Lead and work closely with experienced NLP Engineers in a friendly and stimulating atmosphere, where we encourage collaboration and teamwork.
• Support the development of LLMs for Financial Services in the UK, working on the different stages of the LLM lifecycle.
  
• Lead architectural design of scalable data and machine learning pipelines alongside implementation.
• Ensure that all code is production-ready.
• Collaborate with stakeholders, business analysts, AI researchers and the wider Aveni team throughout the project.

About you

As a Lead NLP Engineer at Aveni, you are a highly accomplished professional with a PhD in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related STEM field, or have equivalent industry experience.
Your research background will be complemented by substantial experience in implementing and leading projects focused on Large Language Models (LLMs) and deep learning architectures.
You thrive in dynamic environments, embracing the challenge of revolutionising NLP applications within the Financial Services sector.

You possess extensive expertise in Python, NLP libraries, large scale training and deployment of deep learning frameworks, enabling you to develop and fine-tune LLMs tailored for Financial Services applications.
With a proven track record of leading NLP projects from inception to deployment, you excel in project planning, resource management, and stakeholder engagement, ensuring timely and successful project outcomes.

Your strong background in machine learning algorithms equips you to tackle complex challenges in NLP, employing innovative solutions and staying abreast of the latest research developments.
Proficient in software development best practices, you demonstrate mastery in version control systems, agile methodologies, and deploying efficient inference models in production environments.

You thrive in collaborative settings, mentoring team members, providing technical guidance, and fostering a culture of innovation and teamwork.
With a keen eye for innovation, you continuously seek opportunities to apply cutting-edge NLP techniques to real-world financial service problems.

Knowledge, skills, and qualifications

• PhD in Computer Science, Engineering or other STEM subjects or equivalent experience.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, with the ability to tackle complex challenges in NLP and develop innovative solutions.
• Experience in developing large language models based on transformer/mamba architectures.
• Proficiency in Python, NLP libraries (NLTK, SpaCy), Hugging Face Transformers, data science libraries (Numpy, Pandas) and deep learning frameworks (TensorFlow and/or PyTorch).
• Experience crawling, cleaning, processing unstructured data.
• Strong background in machine learning algorithms and deep learning architectures relevant to NLP tasks.
• Experience with model optimisation techniques, quantisation, and deployment frameworks for efficient inference on various platforms and devices.
• Familiarity with software development best practices, version control systems (e.g., Git), and agile methodologies.
• Proven track record of leading NLP projects from conception to deployment, including project planning, resource allocation, and stakeholder management.
• Ability to mentor and coach team members, provide technical guidance, and drive collaboration towards project goals.
• Demonstrated ability to stay updated with the latest research and developments in NLP and apply them effectively to real-world problems.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to effectively communicate technical concepts to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Experience presenting project updates, findings, and recommendations to senior leadership and clients.

Nice to have

• Previous experience in the financial services industry.
• Knowledge of best practices for deploying and scaling language models in production environments, including considerations for computational resources, inference speed, and memory efficiency.
• Good grasp of architecture and how best to integrate machine learning into backend services.
• Some experience with MLOps processes and tools.
  Experience with AWS SageMaker would be ideal.
• Understanding of CI/CD & DevOps principles.
• Experience working with cloud environments.

If you feel you meet most, but not all, of these requirements, we'd still like to receive your application.

Benefits

This is a great opportunity to work at the cutting edge of Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing and software development.
Alongside a competitive salary, we also offer:

• 34 days holiday plus your birthday off
• Strong career progression opportunities
• Share options
• Remote and flexible working
• On-going career development and training
• Freebies and discounts (Free coffee, movie downloads, discounts on high street stores, supermarkets, and restaurants)
• Emotional wellbeing (Employee assistance programme.