Founding ML Engineer (Spectrum)

Stack

Responsibilities

• ▹Design and build the ML/LLM solution for data ingestion, knowledge extraction, retrieval and subsequent reasoning
• ▹Create the datasets, metrics and pipelines that drive measurable improvements across the system
• ▹Architect and improve agents for context retrieval, knowledge extraction and data alignment (prompt engineering, model selection, inference optimization)
• ▹Establish MLOps practices: orchestration, observability and experiment tracking
• ▹Collaborate with the engineering team on system design and with JetBrains Research on the research agenda
• ▹Define hiring criteria, grow the ML team and shape the ML team culture

Requirements

• ▹A proven track record as an ML/AI Lead
• ▹At least five years of experience in ML/AI systems, with at least two years focused on LLMs and generative AI
• ▹Deep understanding of the LLM ecosystem, including model architectures and fine-tuning approaches
• ▹Hands-on experience with prompt engineering and LLM pipeline design, including evaluation
• ▹Agentic frameworks such as LangChain, LlamaIndex, LangSmith, smolagents or an equivalent
• ▹Vector databases and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) patterns
• ▹Deploying and scaling LLM-powered applications using APIs (e.g. OpenAI or Anthropic) or open-source models
• ▹Strong Python skills
• ▹Excellent communication skills, with the ability to explain complex technical concepts to diverse audiences
• ▹Proficiency in English, both written and verbal

Nice to have

• ▹Kotlin knowledge
• ▹Experience with ontologies, knowledge graphs or graph-based reasoning
• ▹Experience in early-stage startups: you enjoy the zero-to-one phase
• ▹Ability to think strategically about product-led AI, beyond training models in isolation
• ▹A background in code analysis, developer tools or software engineering research
• ▹Experience with multi-agent systems or complex agentic workflows
• ▹Contributions to relevant open-source projects or publications

Soft skills

What we offer

• ▹Competitive salary and JetBrains benefits
• ▹A generous runway and corporate resources with startup autonomy

About the company

Spectrum is a resident of JetBrains' startup incubator, with startup speed and autonomy, backed by 25 years of developer tooling expertise. It builds knowledge from an organization's code, docs and issues into a unified ontology that AI agents can efficiently search and reason over.