Machine Learning Engineer
Rising Academies, India
Job Description
The context:
Across the developing world, more children than ever are in school but they are not learning. A recent study estimated that less than 1% of schoolchildren in Sub-Saharan Africa attend a school where the teaching meets basic standards of quality. At Rising Academies, we’re changing that, and we want your help.
About us:
We are a growing network of inspiring schools in West Africa. Our mission is to unleash the full potential of every student, equipping them with the knowledge, skills, and character to succeed in further study, work, and day-to-day life. We support more than 250,000 students across Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Ghana through a combination of low-cost private schools we manage directly, and partnership schools we manage in collaboration with governments. Independent evaluations have found that Rising students make learning gains two to three times larger than their peers in comparable schools.
We have recently closed our Series A funding round and won a multi-year, multi-million dollar grant to accelerate the development of our digital ed-tech solutions for low-income students across the globe. Our ‘Bambai’ suite of digital tools already includes a school information system, school observation tool, chatbot tutor, accelerated learning program, and teacher coaching app. This is just the start. We want to expand our range of digital products to help improve the quality of education for millions of students around the world. If you want to make a difference in the lives of teachers, students, and parents, then we are the right place for you.
About the role:
We are looking for a Machine Learning Engineer to join our product team for Rori, an AI-powered math tutor that students use over WhatsApp. As Rori is a chatbased interface, expertise in NLP is a must. You will be a founding member of our Machine Learning team and will be working in close collaboration with experts from organizations such as Oxford University, the University of Florida, and Schmidt Futures. You will be joining a small team solving big real-world problems, working in an agile environment, and deploying new features every week. We are all self-motivated and ready to support one another to get the job done. If you want to make a difference in the lives of teachers, students, and parents, then you are in the right place!
The Machine Learning Engineer will:
- Collaborate in the development of Rori's architectural design by working with key stakeholders, and other potential ML Specialist Consultants.
- Ensure Rori's automated A/B testing tools are designed, deployed, and utilized to their full potential.
- Develop a product feature for Rori that predicts student learning ability.
- Develop a scalable machine learning infrastructure.
- Co-design ML models, evaluate performance, refine models, and put them into production.
- Create a product feature based on a recommender system that enables Rori to offer users customized suggestions.
- Optimize data pipelines (acquisition, cleaning, transformation).
- Run evaluation experiments.
- Remain updated in the rapidly changing field of machine learning.
- Collaborate with academics at Oxford, UF, WPI, UC, and UPenn among others.
- Communicate with the product and content teams to inform and iterate on your models.
Location and reporting:
This is a full-time remote position and is open to candidates from around the world. The role reports to the CTO of Rising Academies.
Requirements
Qualifications and Experience:
- Bsc in Computer Science, Engineering or relevant field; graduate degree in Data Science or other quantitative field is preferred BSc, MSc, or PhD in a relevant field or equivalent on-the-job experience.
- A minimum of 5+ years of experience developing and deploying machine learning systems into production
- Experience in deploying production-grade machine learning models.
- Experience with tools for managing the ML lifecycle (e.g. Airflow, Kubeflow, MLflow).
- Experience with cloud services and infrastructure as code.
- Experience with GitHub and testing components used to deploy CI/CD pipelines.
- Understanding of containerization to execute tasks in reproducible environments.
- Experience with NLP, specifically LLMs, common platforms (i.e Hugginface) and libraries.
Preferred but not essential
- Experience working in Edtech or a startup environment.
About You:
- You can communicate with technical teams and stakeholders in a multicultural environment, as well as clearly document reports for these audiences.
- You demonstrate people skills; must be able to collaborate effectively wi