Software Engineer in Data Science

Vitol is the world’s largest independent energy and commodities trading company. Every day we use our expertise and logistical networks to distribute energy around the world, efficiently and responsibly. From 40 offices worldwide, we seek to add value across the energy supply chain, including deploying our scale and market understanding to help facilitate the energy transition. To date, we have committed over $1 billion of capital to renewable projects and are identifying and developing low‑carbon opportunities around the world.

Our people are our business. Talent is precious to us and we create an environment in which individuals can reach their full potential, unhindered by hierarchy. Our team comprises more than 65+ nationalities and we are committed to developing and sustaining a diverse work force. Learn more about us here .

This Role is located in Houston, TX - In office 5x a week

As our portfolio of work continues to grow, we are looking for an experienced Software Engineer to join our global data science and machine learning team. This role will have an initial focus on supporting our GenAI tools, including our firmwide virtual assistant. Concretely this means you will:

• Implement: take the requirements from our broad range of commercial stakeholders and translate these into application features.
• Design:
  Ensure we design and build the models and tools to meet the functional/non-functional requirements, as well as being supportable. The role will also help partner teams understand how they can support and integrate to the AI tools.
• Translate:
  Act as a local champion for data science and AI, helping users adopt tools and articulate their changes and requirements to the wider team.

The individual will work both with our data scientists and machine learning engineers but will also need to directly engage with the commercial teams (across trading, operations, support functions, etc.).

The role will also act as a bridge between the Data Science team and other technology teams for areas like application integration, data sourcing, infrastructure and tooling.

For the successful candidate, this role will give them exposure across the machine learning lifecycle, being able to apply their skills wherever they can add value, from working with business stakeholders to help define the project, to data collation through to solution design and model implementation.

We are looking for a candidate who brings both a breadth and depth of experience, from a theoretical and practical perspective; but equally someone who can and wants to continue learning.

As a small team, everyone is expected to organize, prioritize and execute their own tasks; with a strong focus on maximizing the business value from their actions. This means the individual will need to be comfortable working on multiple projects simultaneously, managing competing priorities and stakeholder requirements.

The successful candidate will join a team of experienced, collaborative practitioners, who are (pragmatically) solving some of the most challenging and impactful problems the energy industry is facing; as well as pushing the boundaries around the ‘art of the possible’.

Core

Responsibilities include:

• Act as the primary point of contact in Houston for our GenAI toolset
• In conjunction with the global Data Scientists deliver models and solutions to business users, and other technology teams across a wide range of projects and technologies
• Develop, test, maintain software tools and data pipelines for machine learning
• Provide software engineering and design expertise and best practices (Python) with a focus on maintainability, performance, and reliability
• As needed, take ownership of key technical infrastructure
• Engage with projects at any point in their lifecycle, understand and debug bespoke applications; driving performance and reliability
• Manage relationships and priorities across projects, focused on maximising value
• Actively participating in and leading code reviews, experiment design and tooling decisions to help drive the team’s velocity and quality

Essential Qualifications

• 3-5+ years in industry; fluency in Python with ability…