Senior Machine Learning Engineer

📋 Job Overview

ExTrac is a decision intelligence company used by governments, defence organisations, financial institutions, and corporates operating in complex, fast-moving environments. Our capabilities fuse curated data sources, domain-specific AI, and deep human expertise to transform information overload into clear, actionable foresight. We are looking for a Senior ML Engineer to join ExTrac's Machine Learning team, which owns our modelling capabilities end-to-end.

🏢 About ExTrac

ExTrac is a decision intelligence company used by governments, defence organisations, financial institutions, and corporates operating in complex, fast-moving environments. Our capabilities fuse curated data sources, domain-specific AI, and deep human expertise to transform information overload into clear, actionable foresight. Our ambition is to become the analytical backbone that organisations rely on when geopolitical uncertainty becomes an opportunity or a strategic risk. More at extrac.ai.

🎯 The Role

Location: Hybrid (In-office in London, minimum 2 days per week)
We are looking for a Senior ML Engineer to join ExTrac's Machine Learning team, which owns our 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 lead technical direction on major initiatives, set standards across the team, and mentor others. You will take projects from prototype to reliable production deployment, collaborate closely with the engineers who design the data collection and processing backend, and engage directly with senior stakeholders.

✅ Key Responsibilities

• Design systems that balance research velocity with real product and production constraints
• Make 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

📌 Required Qualifications

• You like using machine learning to solve challenging problems in a complex domain
• You enjoy working closely with product, design and the analysts who use what you build, and you take the lead in turning their feedback into technical decisions
• You have hands-on experience with model serving (small models and LLMs), agent orchestration and retrieval systems, and a thoughtful, current view on effective workflows in this space
• You care about engineering fundamentals: writing code that's clean and maintainable, and you hold the people around you to that same bar
• You're comfortable owning ambiguity, setting direction, and mentoring others in a fast-paced environment

⭐ Desirable Experience

• Early-stage start-up experience
• Building agentic tools and harnesses
• Working on domain specific modelling problems
• Clear writing, systematic thinking and 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, hybrid: minimum 2 days per week in our central London office.

🛂 Visa & Eligibility

Due to the nature of our work and the clients we support, applicants must be eligible to obtain UK security clearance. We are currently only able to consider applicants who are nationals of a NATO member state, Australia, or New Zealand.