Senior Lead ML Encoder

PAY: $60-110/hour W2. Our company offers our consultants a suite of benefits after a qualification period including health, vision, dental, life and disability insurance. Hybrid Role, onsite work expected 3 days/week in South San Francisco, CA W2 Candidates only Description The goal is to build the first shared learned representation of our customers — one dense vector per customer, trained on longitudinal transaction, sales and interaction history — that downstream GenAI and analytics products can reuse instead of each re-deriving its own view of the same market. The contractor will design the pretraining objective, train and evaluate the encoder, and produce the evidence that determines whether the approach continues. Evaluation is as much of the deliverable as the model. This is a hands-on senior contractor who must define the modeling objectives and evaluation design and write production code — not execute a specification handed to them. Minimum capabilities Has personally trained an encoder or embedding model, including designing the pretraining objective — not only consumed pre-trained embeddings or fine-tuned a published large language modelDeep expertise in representation learning: self-supervised or contrastive pretraining, sequence and temporal modeling, transformers, graph neural networks or recommender embeddingsExperience modeling large, sparse, longitudinal event data such as transactions, claims, clickstream, customer journeys or engagement historiesExperience building inductive representations, so an entity with little history can be represented from its own features rather than a lookup tableRigorous evaluation practice: time-based splits, leakage detection, cold-start slices, transfer to held-out populations, stated uncertainty and hard baselinesAbility to judge whether an embedding carries genuine incremental signal downstream, including calibration, stability, drift and subgroup performanceStrong Python engineering with PyTorch or JAX, SQL, distributed data processing and cloud-based model training at scaleExperience carrying a model from research into production: data contracts, training pipelines, versioning, serving, monitoring and reproducibilityAbility to present findings and uncertainty credibly to senior stakeholders, and to recommend stopping an approach that is not working Preferred Experience with customer-360 representations, behavioral embeddings, recommender systems or foundation models over event dataFamiliarity with privacy, fairness and re-identification risk in learned representations of individualsPublications, patents or public applied work in representation learningAny industry with large-scale behavioral event data is relevant — consumer technology, marketplaces, streaming, financial services, payments or advertising technology. Domain knowledge is not required. Who We Are: The Fountain Group is a nationwide staffing firm with over 80 Fortune 100-500 clients. Since 2001, TFG has maintained a consistent standard of excellence, and our work is broadly recognized every year through numerous industry performance awards. Our success is a team effort. Browse our website below for additional information on our company. The Fountain Group 3407 W Martin Luther King Jr. Dr. Tampa, FL 33607 “We work in Life Sciences, Clinical, Engineering, IT, and more. Above all, we specialize in people.” By applying for this job, you agree to receive calls, AI-generated calls, text messages, or emails from and its affiliates, and contracted partners. Frequency varies for text messages. Message and data rates may apply. Carriers are not liable for delayed or undelivered messages. You can reply STOP to cancel and HELP for help. You can access our privacy policy at Privacy Policy