Founding ML Engineer (Spectrum)

Your responsibilities will include

• Designing and building the ML/LLM solution for data ingestion, knowledge extraction, retrieval, and subsequent reasoning.
• Creating the datasets, metrics, and pipelines that drive measurable improvements across the system.
• Architecting and improving agents for context retrieval, knowledge extraction, and data alignment, which includes prompt engineering, model selection, and inference optimization.
• Establishing MLOps practices, including orchestration, observability, and experiment tracking.
• Collaborating with the engineering team on system design and with JetBrains Research on the research agenda.
• Defining hiring criteria, growing the ML team, and shaping the ML team culture.

We expect you to have

• A proven track record as an ML/AI Lead.
• At least five years of experience in ML/AI systems, with at least two years focused on LLMs and generative AI.
• A deep understanding of the LLM ecosystem, including model architectures and fine-tuning approaches.
• Hands-on experience with:
• Prompt engineering and LLM pipeline design, including evaluation.
• Agentic frameworks such as LangChain, LlamaIndex, LangSmith, smolagents, or an equivalent.
• Vector databases and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) patterns.
• Deploying and scaling LLM-powered applications using APIs (e.g. OpenAI or Anthropic) or open-source models.
• Strong Python skills – Kotlin knowledge would be a plus.
• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to explain complex technical concepts to diverse audiences.
• Proficiency in English, both written and verbal.

Our ideal candidate would have

• Experience with ontologies, knowledge graphs, or graph-based reasoning.
• Experience in early-stage startups – you enjoy the zero-to-one phase.
• The ability to think strategically about product-led AI, beyond just training models in isolation.
• A background in code analysis, developer tools, or software engineering research.
• Experience with multi-agent systems or complex agentic workflows.
• Actively contributed to relevant open-source projects or publications.