Senior AI/ML Engineer

📋 Job Overview

This role is also open to candidates living in the EU or EEA. We can't consider applications from other locations. Most ML jobs hand you a benchmark. This one hands you a business problem with paying customers and their real data. Construction tenders are long, messy and full of trade jargon, and every decision a customer makes on our platform becomes a labeled example you can train on. We need someone who can turn that data into models that customers notice: from the first experiment to the model serving production traffic, and back again when a customer says it got something wrong.

🏢 About Scalera

Scalera is an ETH Zurich spin-off building AI for the €200B+ European construction industry. Manufacturers, wholesalers and suppliers in Switzerland, Austria and Germany still run their most document-heavy work by hand, from reading 300-page tenders to retyping purchase orders into their ERP. We automate that work one process at a time, and ML sits at the center of every one of them.

🎯 The Role

You'll own the ML behind our products, end to end. In practice that means:

✅ Key Responsibilities

• Training and fine-tuning: embedding models, rerankers, classifiers and LLMs, trained on our own data.
• Document understanding: models that pull structure, quantities and product specs out of tenders, orders and catalogs.
• Product matching: retrieval and LLM agents that match tender positions to the right products.
• Evaluation: offline benchmarks, per-customer evals and gates that keep a new model from shipping if it makes things worse.
• Training and serving infrastructure: automated retrain pipelines, GPU serving and vector search in production.
• Customer problems: when a model gets something wrong for a customer, finding out why and fixing it.

📌 Required Qualifications

• You've taken something from zero to one: a company, a model in production, or a side project with real users.
• You've trained and fine-tuned models yourself, ideally embeddings, retrieval or document models, and evaluated them honestly on held-out data.
• You've built with LLMs in production and know where agents fail.
• You write strong Python and can run what you build: Docker, CI/CD, and cloud on GCP, AWS or Azure.
• You measure before you believe, and a single aggregate score doesn't convince you.
• You'd rather open a customer's actual document than wait for a spec.
• You're comfortable with ambiguity. You can make progress while the problem is still half-defined, which at a startup it usually is.
• You want a large scope of responsibility and are happy to own things well beyond your job title.
• Rapidly changing requirements don't throw you. When customers or priorities shift, you adapt and keep going.
• You enjoy direct customer contact and want to be on customer calls.
• You write clearly in English. German is a plus, not a requirement.

🎁 Benefits

Competitive salary and meaningful equity. Zürich HQ, four days in the office, Fridays remote. If not located in Zürich then this role is open to remote within the EU or EEA, Occasional customer visits across Switzerland, Austria and Germany. Small team, no bureaucracy. You'll work directly with the CEO, CTO, VP Engineering and Customer Success.

🛂 Visa & Eligibility

This role is also open to candidates living in the EU or EEA. We can't consider applications from other locations.