Arkestro is seeking a passionate, talented, and inventive Applied Scientist with a strong background in procurement to contribute to the development of industry-leading state-of-the-art AI/ML solutions for large global enterprises.You will be a foundational member of a small but growing team of Generative AI-focused engineers and researchers within the company, building new products and validating them in a rapid environment. As a part of our team, you will have the opportunity to engage with various aspects of the AI/ML feature life cycle, leveraging your expertise in NLP. You will play a pivotal role in building production-level machine learning models that enable more personalized and automated customer experiences across the Arkestro platform. This is a great opportunity to ground research ideas into exciting new products based on real data for actual customers, and to disrupt an $80bn+ industry in the process.

Responsibilities:

• Leverage state-of-the-art NLP methodologies and propose innovative solutions that will impact procurement and supply chain
• Build, fine-tune, optimize, and implement large language models in our applications, with a focus on augmenting the procurement and supply chain functions for our customers
• Develop and refine NLP models for applications such as question answering, data visualization, information extraction, crawling, conversational agents and image-to-text, etc.
• Collaborate with the Product Engineering team to design and implement advanced AI algorithms
• Help define the requirements to build and scale large language models across our customer base
• Communicate complex research and results to non-technical stakeholders and team members, ensuring the advantages and limitations of LLMs are clearly understood across the board
• Stay abreast of the latest trends in NLP and AI research and integrate them into our products and services
• Understand the pain points of our customers in procurement and supply chain to evaluate model performance and the impact of LLM approaches
• Support cross company LLM adoption, guiding others, making LLMs easily accessible, and helping leverage humans in the loop etc.

Qualifications:

• PhD in Computer Science, Linguistics, AI, or a related field with a focus on Natural Language Processing, or equivalent Masters with 3+ yrs of applied commercial experience
• Demonstrated experience in NLP and machine learning through academic research or relevant work experience. Preferred: one or more publications in top natural language processing/machine learning conferences, such as ACL, EMNLP, ICML, NeurIPS, , etc.
• Proficiency with programming languages such as Python or Java
• Hands-on experience with NLP libraries such as Hugging Face, NLTK, SpaCy, or similar, and ML Frameworks such as spaCy, SparkNLP, TensorFlow, PyTorch, MXNet, Scikit-Learn, etc.
• Strong understanding of deep learning architectures relevant to NLP, such as transformers, recurrent neural networks (RNNs), SGD, attention-mechanisms, etc.
• Excellent problem-solving skills and ability to work in a fast-paced, dynamic environment
• Experience fine-tuning pre-trained language models such as BERT, RoBERTa, GPT, etc.
• Familiarity with agile software development practices such as code reviews, unit testing, and git

Preferred Qualifications

• Knowledgeable about procurement and supply chain management
• Experience fine-tuning Large Language Models such as LLaMA, OPT, Alpaca, Dolly, Pythia, GPT-NeoX, FLAN, etc. or training LLMs from scratch