Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Generative AI Products, HBS Foundry

Description

By working at Harvard University, you join a vibrant community that advances Harvard's world‑changing mission in meaningful ways, inspires innovation and collaboration, and builds skills and expertise. We are dedicated to creating a diverse and welcoming environment where everyone can thrive.

HBS Foundry is a new initiative at Harvard Business School that helps founders build, fund, and launch their ventures through an AI‑driven digital learning platform. We're a small, collaborative team within one of the world's most respected institutions—combining the energy of a startup with the mission and reach of Harvard. Foundry brings together educators, engineers, and creative thinkers who are passionate about innovation, learning, and impact.

Together, we're developing tools and experiences that empower founders to grow their ventures and their confidence. It's an exciting, fast‑moving environment where new ideas matter and every team member has the opportunity to shape what comes next.

Lead comprehensive applications/web development for highly complex projects; typically work as part of a team to implement complex business solutions. Deliver strategic and expert coding; focus on overarching development strategy for a large, complex, multi‑faceted application. May manage a number of projects simultaneously.

• Build trust and collaboration by being present on‑site and engaging directly with colleagues and various constituents.
• Architect, build, maintain, and improve new and existing suite of GenAI applications and their underlying systems.
• Automate machine learning pipelines, monitor performance and costs, and optimize models by using techniques such as LoRA/QLoRA.
• Establish reusable frameworks to streamline model building, deployment and monitoring. Incorporate comprehensive monitoring, logging, tracing, and alerting mechanisms.
• Build guardrails, compliance rules and oversight workflows into the GenAI application platform, such as establishing approval chains for model updates and staged rollout for production releases.
• Develop templates, guides and sandbox environments for easy onboarding of new contributors and experimentation with new techniques.
• Ensure development of user‑facing applications in the GenAI application platform is easy and safe by enforcing rigorous validation testing before publishing user‑generated models and implement a clear peer review process of applications.
• Use your entrepreneurial spirit to identify new opportunities to optimize business processes, improve consumer experiences, and prototype solutions to demonstrate value.
• Work closely with data scientists and analysts to create and deploy new product features online and in mobile apps.
• Contribute to and promote good software engineering practices across the team.
• Mentor and educate team members to adopt best practices in writing and maintaining production machine learning code.
• Actively contribute to and re‑use community best practices.
• Monitor, debug, track, and resolve production issues.

• Work with project managers to ensure that projects proceed on time and on budget.
• Collaborate with Technical Product Managers to ensure proper tracking of algorithmic performance KPIs and prioritize performance improvements based on effort and impact.
• Complete other responsibilities as assigned.

• 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 desired.
• Minimum of five years' software development experience with Python and SQL.
• Minimum of three years' experience building pipelines to deploy NLP and deep learning models into production in a cloud environment.
• Minimum three years' experience using PyTorch, Tensorflow, or MXNet, along with optimizing code for GPU clusters.
• Experience building advanced workflows such as retrieval augmented generation, model chaining, dynamic prompting, PEFT/SFT, etc. using Langchain and similar tools.
• Experience establishing model guardrails and…