Summary
What you’ll impact
The Lead Machine Learning Engineer will guide technical direction and delivery for client projects where machine learning is central, designing, training, and deploying models while mentoring engineers. This hybrid role in Madison, WI involves collaborating with DevOps, presenting to clients, and contributing to pre‑sales activities.
Responsibilities
What you'll do
- Design, train, and evaluate models for classification, forecasting, anomaly detection, and more.
- Choose the right approach for the problem, from classical ML to deep learning.
- Decide when a pretrained model beats a custom one, and explain why.
- Shape messy client data into features a model can actually learn from.
- Define how models get measured, so everyone knows what “good” looks like.
- Partner with DevOps to deploy, monitor, and retrain models in production.
- Own technical delivery for your project team: quality, pace, and direction.
- Mentor the engineers on your team through code reviews and one-on-one problem solving.
- Help engineers work through hard problems instead of solving them for them.
- Present results, tradeoffs, and risks to clients in plain language.
- Join pre-sales conversations with solution outlines and rough estimates.
- Document key decisions in ADRs so the next team knows why, not just what.
Requirements
What you’ll bring
- 6+ years in software engineering, data science, or ML engineering.
- Hands-on experience building and training ML models that shipped.
- Time leading technical work for a team, formally or informally.
- A broad ML toolkit rather than a single narrow specialty.
- Comfort making sound calls when the data or requirements are fuzzy.
- Honesty about what a model can and can’t do.
- Genuine interest in helping other engineers grow.
- Ability to explain technical tradeoffs to non-technical stakeholders.
- Candidates must be eligible to work in the U.S. on a permanent basis and can work on-site in our office located in Madison, Wisconsin.