Machine Learning Engineer at ExTrac in London

Job description

• Application
• We are currently only able to consider applicants who are nationals of a NATO member state, Australia, or New Zealand.
• This role is open at both mid and senior level. Scope, autonomy and expected impact will scale with experience and ability. Senior candidates will typically lead technical direction on major initiatives, set standards across the team and mentor others; mid-level candidates will own significant components end-to-end and contribute to broader technical decisions.
• The Machine Learning team owns ExTrac’s modelling capabilities end-to-end. You will partner directly with software engineering and product design to understand requirements, design and run model evaluations, integrate optimised workflows into production pipelines and ensure results remain reliable at scale.
• You will architect cutting-edge agentic systems for large-scale analysis of the geopolitical landscape, train and evaluate domain-specific models for the unique problems our customers face and work with design and engineering to bring them into the product. Alongside domain experts you will translate research into practical solutions for analysts operating at the frontier of their field.
• In this role you will set high technical standards and take projects from prototype to reliable production deployment. You will collaborate closely with the engineers who design the data collection and processing backend and engage directly with senior stakeholders.
• We look for people who enjoy challenging problems, keep learning and build systems that scale. We value low ego, genuine ownership and a passion for applying AI to high-stakes intelligence challenges.

Responsibilities

• Design systems that balance research velocity with real product and production constraints
• Make (and help shape) technical decisions on model selection, training approaches, evaluation and deployment
• Deliver production-ready systems at scale, combining research rigour with pragmatic engineering
• Take projects from early exploration through to reliable deployment
• Uphold high standards for architecture, code quality, evaluation and research practice

Requirements

• Technical excellence (working on production systems at scale, research that was used, or end-to-end ownership in an early-stage role)
• Hands-on experience with model serving (small models and LLMs), agent orchestration and retrieval systems
• Rigour in evaluation and benchmarking
• Strong engineering fundamentals: ability to write clean, maintainable code and design robust systems
• Comfort with a fast paced environment and clear ownership
• Experience with modern coding agents and thoughtful views on effective workflows
• Early-stage start-up experience
• Building agentic tools and harnesses
• Working on domain specific modelling problems
• Clear writing, systematic thinking and strong communication

Skills

Required

• Technical excellence
• Agent orchestration
• Retrieval systems
• Rigour in evaluation and benchmarking
• Strong engineering fundamentals
• Clean, maintainable code
• Robust system design
• Comfort with fast-paced environment
• Clear ownership
• Experience with modern coding agents

Preferred

• Early-stage start-up experience
• Building agentic tools and harnesses
• Domain specific modelling
• Clear writing
• Systematic thinking
• Strong communication

Benefits

• Competitive salary based on skills and experience.
• A generous benefits package, including Private Medical Health Insurance and enhanced pension contributions.
• Enhanced parental leave and a workplace nursery scheme.
• £500/year education budget with more expensive items (like conferences) covered with manager approval.
• 33 days of leave across the year inclusive of bank holidays.
• Flexible working. The team is typically in our central London office two days a week, and you are welcome to come in up to five.