Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Generative AI Products, HBS Foundry

Harvard University - Boston, MA

Full-time - Senior

Hybrid - Boston, MA

Educational Services

About the position

HBS Foundry, created by Harvard Business School, is a cutting-edge digital platform dedicated to empowering entrepreneurs from underserved backgrounds. At the forefront of innovation, we leverage advanced AI technologies to create interactive tools that enhance the entrepreneurial journey. Our mission is to democratize access to the knowledge, tools, and resources necessary for entrepreneurs to address the world's most impactful venture opportunities. Join our dynamic team and help shape the future of entrepreneurship. We are seeking a talented Generative AI Engineer to join our team. In this role, you will design, develop, and deploy state-of-the-art generative AI models, directly impacting our platform's ability to provide interactive and intelligent tools for our users. As a Senior Machine Learning Engineer specializing in Generative AI applications, you will play a pivotal role in developing innovative generative AI products that support the HBS Foundry team and learners on our platform. This key technical role requires hands-on expertise across the full machine learning lifecycle. You will operationalize machine learning models in production and manage the lifecycle of artificial intelligence algorithms and tools across a variety of domains. The Foundry Team will support with domain knowledge.

Responsibilities

• Designing, developing, deploying, and implementing multi-agent AI tools that assess and provide feedback on venture-related submissions.
• Automatically generating pitch decks, financial projections, marketing strategies, and other materials to support entrepreneurs.
• Acting as a counterparty to simulate important entrepreneurial interactions such as customer interviews and negotiations with investors.
• Designing generative AI models using techniques like natural language processing and machine learning that can power interactive tools on HBS Foundry.
• Designing an AI-powered system that collects key factors to determine a learner's profile, entrepreneurial progress, and venture progress, providing customized learning pathways based on these factors.
• Integrating AI tools into the HBS Foundry platform in a seamless manner for user accessibility.
• Building guardrails, compliance rules, and oversight workflows into the GenAI tools and Foundry platform.
• Continually improving AI tools using feedback from users to ensure they provide valuable assistance.
• Monitoring, debugging, tracking, and resolving production issues.
• Working with the Foundry Project Director to ensure that projects proceed on time and on budget.
• Collaborating with Product Managers to ensure proper tracking of performance KPIs and prioritizing improvements based on effort and impact.
• Presenting prototypes and progress updates to stakeholders.
• Staying up to date on the latest advances in AI/ML research and identifying how new techniques could enhance the HBS Foundry platform.
• Collaborating with a team of engineers, designers, and subject matter experts to deliver high-quality, helpful AI-powered experiences.

Requirements

• Minimum of seven years' post-secondary education or relevant work experience.
• Bachelor's degree in mathematics, physics, computer science, engineering, statistics, or an equivalent technical discipline.
• 3+ years of experience building (Generative) AI models and tools highly preferable.
• Expertise in NLP, deep learning, and other relevant techniques.
• Strong programming skills in Python and frameworks like TensorFlow.
• Experience building advanced workflows such as retrieval augmented generation, model chaining, dynamic prompting, PEFT/SFT, etc. using Langchain and similar tools.
• Experience integrating AI into consumer-facing applications (front-end and back-end development for integrating AI solutions into web applications).
• Experience establishing model guardrails and developing bias detection and mitigation techniques for AI applications using tools (such as NeMo).
• Experience with various embedding models and setting up and tuning vector databases to improve performance of semantic search and retrieval systems.
• Experience working with a variety of relational SQL and NoSQL databases, big data tools (such as Hadoop, Spark, Kafka), and at least one cloud provider solution (AWS highly preferable).
• Experience in using version control systems such as Git.
• Experience with containerization and orchestration tools like Docker and Kubernetes.
• Experience with API development and integration for AI services.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills.
• Knowledge of data pipeline and workflow management tools.
• Expertise in standard software engineering methodology, e.g., unit testing, test automation, continuous integration, code reviews, design documentation.

Nice-to-haves

• Advanced degree in computer science, data science, engineering, or a related field within AI/ML or equivalent experience preferred.
• Experience working in a similar role in a startup environment preferable.
• Passion for using AI to solve real-world problems.

Benefits

• Hybrid work environment with onsite expectations of 3 days per week.
• Access to Harvard's Total Rewards benefits package.