Senior Machine Learning Scientist

Company: Turnitin
Location: Remote

About Turnitin

Join Turnitin, a recognized innovator in the global education space for over 25 years. We partner with educational institutions worldwide to promote honesty, consistency, and fairness across all subject areas and assessment types. Over 21,000 academic institutions, publishers, and corporations utilize our services, including Feedback Studio, Originality, Gradescope, ExamSoft, Similarity, and iThenticate. Experience a remote-centric culture that empowers you to work with purpose and accountability, supported by a comprehensive package prioritizing your well-being. Our diverse community is united by a shared desire to make a difference in education.

About the Role

Machine Learning is integral to Turnitin's continued success, and we have an exciting and ambitious product roadmap. You will join a global team of curious, helpful, and independent scientists and engineers dedicated to delivering cutting-edge, well-engineered Machine Learning systems. You will collaborate closely with product and engineering teams across Turnitin to integrate Machine Learning into a broad suite of learning, teaching, and integrity products. Your contributions will have global reach and scale, impacting millions of students and hundreds of thousands of instructors worldwide.

Responsibilities

As a Senior Machine Learning Scientist, you will be versatile with a well-balanced set of skills, focusing on model training and maintenance. Your responsibilities will include:

• Working with subject matter experts and product owners to define key questions and identify answerable inquiries.
• Curating, generating, and annotating data, and creating optimal datasets with responsible data collection and model maintenance practices.
• Answering questions and creating trainable datasets from raw data using efficient SQL queries and scripting languages, with visualization as needed.
• Developing and tuning Machine Learning models, adhering to best practices for dataset selection, architectures, and model parameters.
• Utilizing, adopting, and fine-tuning Language Models, including third-party LLMs (via prompt engineering and orchestration) and locally hosted LMs.
• Staying current in the field by reading research papers, experimenting with new architectures and LLMs, and sharing findings.
• Optimizing models for scaled production usage.
• Communicating insights, model behavior, and limitations to peers, subject matter experts, and product owners.
• Writing clean, efficient, and modular code with automated tests and appropriate documentation.
• Staying up-to-date with technology, making sound technological choices, and explaining them to the organization.

Requirements

Required Qualifications:

• Experience working with text data to build Deep Learning and ML models (supervised and unsupervised). Experience with deep learning in other modalities (vision, speech) is a strong bonus.
• Strong understanding of the mathematics and theory behind machine learning and deep learning.
• Software engineering background with at least 8 years of experience (proficient in Python, SQL, Unix-based systems, Git, and GitHub).
• Machine/Deep Learning development skills, including experiment tracking (experience with AWS SageMaker, Hugging Face, PyTorch, scikit-learn, Jupyter, Weights & Biases is preferred).
• Understanding of Language Models, including usage, training/fine-tuning, and familiarity with industry-standard LM families.
• Master's degree or PhD in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, AI, Machine Learning, applied math, or a related field, with relevant industry experience, or outstanding previous achievements in a similar role. A Computer Science background is required.
• Excellent communication and teamwork skills.
• Fluent in written and spoken English.

Would be a plus:

• Familiarity with coding for at-scale production, including building back-end API services or stand-alone libraries.
• Essential DevOps skills (experience with Docker, AWS EC2/Batch/Lambda).
• Familiarity with building front-ends (LLMs or standard React, Javascript, Flask) for demos, POCs, and prototypes.
• Experience with advanced prompting, fine-tuning, or training LLMs using industry-accepted platforms (e.g., mosaic.ai, stochastic.ai).
• Showcase previous work (e.g., via a website, presentation, open-source code).

Additional Information

Salary Range: $112,125/year to $186,875/year (bonus eligible)

Total Rewards @ Turnitin:

Turnitin offers a competitive Total Rewards package that includes:

• Remote-First Culture
• Health Care Coverage*
• Education Reimbursement*
• Competitive Paid Time Off
• 4 Self-Care Days per year
• National Holidays*
• 2 Founder Days + Juneteenth Observed
• Paid Volunteer Time*
• Charitable Contribution Match*
• Monthly Wellness or Home Office Reimbursement*
• Access to Modern Health (mental health platform)
• Parental Leave*
• Retirement Plan with match/contribution*

(* varies by country)

Turnitin is committed to fostering a diverse and inclusive workplace. We encourage candidates to apply even if they don't meet 100% of the qualifications. We are an equal opportunity employer.