Senior Data Scientist

About this role

Senior Data Scientist / MLOps (LLMs / SLMs)

Remote (U.S. time zones preferred) | Senior / Lead Level (5–8 years) | No C2C

Our client is seeking a Senior Data Scientist / MLOps expert to lead the development and deployment of cutting-edge Small Language Model (SLM) solutions powering customer-facing AI products.

This is a highly impactful role where you’ll own the end-to-end model lifecycle - from evaluation design to production deployment - and directly shape how AI is used in a specialized, high-stakes domain.

Responsibilities:

• Own the full lifecycle of LLM/SLM development: evaluation, fine-tuning, and production deployment
• Design and implement model evaluation frameworks focused on accuracy, reliability, and low hallucination rates
• Lead model selection and benchmarking across candidate models
• Build and optimize training pipelines (cloud GPU environments, scalable workflows)
• Develop and manage fine-tuning strategies (SFT, LoRA/QLoRA, instruction tuning, alignment methods)
• Own model serving, inference performance, and monitoring (latency, cost, quality metrics)
• Partner cross-functionally with product and engineering teams to translate user feedback into model improvements
• Establish reproducible experimentation and model versioning practices

Qualifications:

• 5–8 years of experience in data science, machine learning, or MLOps
• 2+ years hands-on experience with LLMs/SLMs (fine-tuning, evaluation, deployment)
• Proven track record of shipping ML models into production environments
• Strong Python skills and experience with ML ecosystems (PyTorch, Hugging Face, etc.)
• Experience with RAG systems, model evaluation, and benchmarking
• Familiarity with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and GPU-based training
• Solid understanding of experimentation and statistical evaluation methods
• Strong communication skills with the ability to document findings and drive decisions

Nice to Have:

- Experience with alignment methods (DPO, RLHF variants)
...