Director, Machine Learning

Role overview A senior leadership opportunity to build and run the machine learning organization powering an immigration case management platform, with a focus on document understanding, extraction, and agentic automation across petitions, supporting evidence, and case correspondence. The role combines hands-on technical depth, recognized contributions to the field, and accountability for the cost, quality, and throughput of every model in production.

Responsibilities - Build and scale the ML engineering organization by hiring, structuring pods, and establishing a tech-lead layer for day-to-day decision making. - Set technical strategy for document AI, extraction, and agentic systems applied to immigration case documents and workflows. - Lead structured build-vs-buy evaluations for ML capabilities and vendor tools, weighing cost, accuracy, latency, and compliance. - Design retrieval and context-optimization strategies (RAG, page/section narrowing, agentic cross-validation) that control LLM inference cost without sacrificing accuracy. - Own the ML systems architecture in partnership with platform and product architects, including model serving, evaluation pipelines, and feature/data infrastructure. - Establish LLM evaluation frameworks and quality bars before production release, and drive continuous model and pipeline cost optimization.

Requirements - 8+ years in applied ML/AI with several years leading or managing an ML engineering team, ideally in document understanding, NLP, or search. - Recognized depth in the field such as issued patents, peer-reviewed publications, conference talks, or equivalent contributions. - Track record shipping production LLM, NLP, or document-extraction systems at volume with clear ownership of cost and quality outcomes. - Hands-on depth in LLM and agentic systems, NER and document extraction, and traditional ML such as search, ranking, or classification. - Experience making and defending build-vs-buy decisions for ML capabilities and partnering with architects on platform-level ML infrastructure. - Excellent executive communication skills with the ability to translate technical trade-offs into business terms. - M.S. or Ph.D. in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or a related field preferred.

Nice to have - Experience in healthcare, legal, financial services, or other regulated domains handling sensitive documents.

Benefits and work setup - Annual salary range of $200,000–$245,000. - 100% remote, working from home, within the United States.