Technical Lead, Machine Learning

About the role

A stealth AI startup, backed by one of Southeast Asia's leading technology companies, is building its global founding team. It is developing an AI-native communication platform that integrates AI directly into conversations so users can plan, organize, compare, research and complete tasks in a single assistant. The client is looking for a Technical Lead, Machine Learning to turn research into scalable, production-ready systems, working closely with research, engineering and product teams.

Key responsibilities

• Lead end-to-end execution of machine learning systems, including data pipelines, training workflows, evaluation frameworks, inference architecture and production deployment.
• Fine-tune and optimize models using techniques such as LoRA, QLoRA, Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) and model distillation.
• Design, build and operate scalable inference systems focused on latency, cost efficiency and reliability.
• Develop and maintain data pipelines for synthetic and real-world training datasets.
• Build evaluation frameworks measuring performance, robustness, safety and bias with research teams.
• Optimize production deployments via GPU utilization, memory efficiency, inference optimization and scaling strategies.
• Partner with application engineering teams to integrate ML systems into backend, desktop and mobile products, and continuously improve them through monitoring and data-driven optimization.

Required profile

• Proven experience building and deploying production-grade machine learning systems used by real users.
• Strong expertise with large language models and their behaviour, limitations and failure modes.
• Experience developing scalable ML infrastructure, training pipelines and inference systems.
• Strong software engineering skills and the ability to write maintainable, production-quality code.
• Ability to balance production constraints such as latency, reliability, scalability, cost and safety.
• Strong ownership mindset, able to drive technical initiatives independently from design through deployment.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills in cross-functional engineering teams.

Preferred technical skills

• Python
• PyTorch and/or JAX
• GPU-based model training and inference systems