Senior NLP / Machine Learning Scientist

About the role

Lightcast is seeking a Senior NLP / Machine Learning Scientist to join our AI/ML Lab and build state-of-the-art NLP models for large-scale labor market data. You will develop and productionize models that transform unstructured data such as job postings and professional profiles into structured labor market intelligence. Core problem areas include classification, information extraction, entity recognition, normalization, semantic matching, and multilingual NLP. This role spans the full model lifecycle—from experimentation and fine-tuning to evaluation, optimization, and production inference at scale.

Responsibilities

• Build NLP models for classification, extraction, normalization, entity linking, and semantic matching.
• Develop transformer-based and embedding-based models using architectures such as BERT, DeBERTa, ModernBERT, Sentence Transformers, and modern foundation models.
• Fine-tune and adapt LLMs using techniques such as supervised fine-tuning, LoRA, QLoRA, PEFT, and distillation.
• Evaluate when to use LLMs versus smaller task-specific models based on accuracy, latency, throughput, and cost.
• Optimize models for production using quantization, distillation, batching, model compilation, and efficient inference frameworks.
• Develop multilingual NLP models and cross-lingual approaches for global labor market data.
• Design robust evaluation frameworks, perform error analysis, and continuously improve model quality.
• Partner with ML and data engineers to deploy scalable models and training pipelines in AWS.
• Stay current with advances in NLP, LLMs, embeddings, and efficient machine learning, and translate promising research into production systems.
• Mentor team members and contribute to technical standards and modeling strategy.