Machine Learning Engineer

Our cutting-edge client, building the AI infrastructure layer for modern e-commerce, is searching for a Machine Learning Engineer to join their world-class engineering team in Cape Town (hybrid). The team looks after everything that makes the product work: model serving, data pipelines, the API merchants integrate with, and the infrastructure underneath it all. Together, that handles millions of requests a day.

Your focus will change from week to week. One week you might be deploying a new model from the ML researchers or speeding up inference, the next adding an API feature for a customer or fixing a pipeline. You'll work closely with the leadership team and own the parts of the system you build.

We’re searching for bright minds to help bring novel zero-shot discovery models from research to production. Ultimately, you'll bridge the gap between cutting-edge ML research and scalable, reliable systems.

Responsibilities

• Help take new models from research to production, and keep GPU inference fast and cost-effective
• Build and maintain the pipelines that ingest and embed merchant catalogues
• Build features in GraphQL API, which merchants and developers integrate with
• Look after Kubernetes infrastructure on GCP, including deployments and observability
• Keep training and evaluation pipelines reproducible
• Self-host and run LLMs for judging, annotation and evaluation

Qualifications

• Strong Python and software engineering fundamentals: testing, CI/CD and code others can maintain
• Experience deploying and running ML models in production
• Solid PyTorch and deep learning knowledge, enough to work alongside researchers
• Comfortable with backend services, databases and cloud infrastructure
• A generalist who's happy switching between ML, backend and infra work
• High EQ, low ego, and happy in an early-stage environment
• Nice to have: Ray, Kubernetes, GPU performance work, vector databases, GraphQL, Kafka or LLM serving.

Stack

• ML: PyTorch, Hugging Face, JAX/Flax, Ray (Train, Serve, Data), SGLang, MLflow
• Backend: FastAPI, GraphQL (Strawberry), Prefect, Kafka
• Data: DVC, BigQuery, dbt, Polars, Milvus, Postgres, ClickHouse
• Infra: GKE with GPUs, Helm, Skaffold, Terraform, Nix, uv

Benefits

• Generous equity in the business
• An opportunity to join an early-stage start-up
• Great opportunity to make a large technological impact on the product and its systems
• Complex challenges with fast feedback loops
• Generous leave/solid work-life balance
• Great remuneration package
• Advanced equipment/technology

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This position is open to people already eligible for work in South Africa

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About us

We're a dedicated recruiter bringing together the brightest talent with organisations creating cutting-edge technology to change the world for the better.

We partner with technology providers at the forefront of meaningful innovation. And we’re here for talented individuals who are passionate about using their skills to drive positive change.

Mind Detect provides exceptional recruitment services to businesses who are leading the way in Data, Machine Learning and AI-driven technologies throughout Europe, the US and Asia.