Machine Learning Engineer

POLITICO is seeking a Machine Learning Engineer to help build the next generation of AI-powered newsroom and product capabilities. As we expand into new sector products, new professional audiences and new geographies under our Go-Forward Growth Strategy, POLITICO is investing in machine learning systems that go beyond simply integrating foundation models. This role will work alongside software engineers, product managers, journalists and editorial leadership to develop models, evaluation frameworks and data pipelines that apply POLITICO’s editorial expertise across AI-powered tools and improve newsroom and product workflows.

The ideal candidate is excited about applying machine learning in support of journalism. You’ll work closely with software engineers, journalists and product teams to develop AI-powered tools and data products that strengthen reporting, improve newsroom workflows and help bring POLITICO’s editorial expertise to a broader audience.

• Design, build and deploy production machine learning systems that support newsroom, editorial and new-audience initiatives.
• Develop classification, prediction and ranking models using proprietary newsroom data and editorial expertise — a modeling foundation that extends across new sector products (Decoded, Code & Counsel, Energy, Pharma) rather than requiring a bespoke build per vertical.
• Build datasets, feature engineering pipelines and evaluation frameworks to improve AI system performance, including turning the Leadership team’s data-needs definitions into working systems.
• Experiment with prompting, retrieval, fine-tuning and other model adaptation techniques to solve journalism‑specific problems.
• Partner closely with journalists and editors to translate editorial knowledge into machine learning features, labels and evaluation criteria.
• Collaborate with software engineers to integrate machine learning capabilities into production applications.
• Measure and improve model quality using rigorous evaluation methodologies that balance accuracy, editorial standards and operational performance.
• Evaluate new AI technologies while considering performance, cost, maintainability and long‑term flexibility.

You may work on initiatives such as:

• Building systems that classify the newsworthiness of stories using editorial judgment.
• Developing prediction models that combine public information with POLITICO's proprietary reporting expertise — the same approach that powers POLITICO Signals and Agency IQ.
• Improving AI‑assisted editing by helping models better understand and apply POLITICO's editorial style guide.
• Creating proprietary classifiers that enrich public datasets with editorial intelligence, extendable to new sector products as they launch.
• Designing evaluation frameworks to measure AI quality before newsroom deployment.
• Optimizing AI workflows to improve performance while reducing inference costs.
• Supporting investigative and enterprise reporting through machine‑learning‑assisted analysis of complex datasets.

• 5+ years of professional experience building or deploying machine learning systems.
• Strong software engineering skills, preferably in Python.
• Experience with machine learning fundamentals including supervised learning, feature engineering, model evaluation and experimentation.
• Experience with modern machine learning frameworks such as PyTorch or Tensor Flow.
• Familiarity with large language models, embeddings or natural language processing techniques.
• Experience working with structured and unstructured data.
• Strong problem‑solving and analytical skills.
• Excellent communication skills and the ability to collaborate with engineers, product managers and non‑technical stakeholders.

• Experi…