Senior ML Engineer

Location: Barcelona

Department: Engineering

Location Type: IN_OFFICE

Employment Type: FULL_TIME

About Us

The Role

Key Responsibilities:

• Learning Flywheel Architecture: Design and own the continuous learning loop for Afori's agent swarm: capturing agent outcomes, expert feedback, and case feedback to systematically improve agent performance over time.
• Model Fine-Tuning & Distillation: Own the fine-tuning and distillation pipeline for specialized German insurance NLP tasks: selecting, training, and evaluating open-weight and proprietary models per task, with rigorous eval gates before production rollout.
• Cross-Sell Intelligence Models: Build and own ML models that identify and score cross-sell opportunities across the customer book, translating APDB and account data into actionable revenue signals for the broker.
• ML Infrastructure & Evaluation Standards: Establish and maintain the evaluation methodology (gold sets, benchmarks, abstention/faithfulness checks) and the serving infrastructure that all Afori ML models must meet before deployment.

What We’re Looking For

• Strong track record building and shipping ML systems in production: fine-tuning, distillation, and evaluation of both open-weight and proprietary LLMs.
• Hands-on experience designing evaluation methodologies: gold sets, benchmarks, abstention and faithfulness checks, and eval gates that decide what reaches production.
• Solid ML engineering fundamentals: training pipelines, serving infrastructure, and cost-aware inference at scale.
• Comfort owning ambiguous problems end to end in a fast-moving early-stage environment. You are a finisher, not just a starter.
• Bonus: German language skills, NLP experience in regulated domains (insurance, finance, legal, health), or experience with agentic systems and continuous learning loops.

Compensation & Benefits

• Base salary: Competitive
• Team bonus: 10% of base at 100% team goal achievement, paid half in cash and half in equity.
• Equity: A meaningful founding-level option grant in a4i Inc. (Delaware C-Corp TopCo), vesting over 4 years with a 1-year cliff, then monthly. Options convert to common shares on exercise, making you a real shareholder on the cap table.
• Annual reviews: Compensation and options are rediscussed after 12 months at the latest. We grant options/shares annually, so the best performers continuously get more.

Pathways to additional equity

• Annual company ranking: Top performers receive additional equity at the annual compensation review.
• Team goal achievement: When teams exceed objectives, you choose between a cash bonus and additional equity.
• Promotion: Grants aligned with expanded responsibility.
• Direct investment: You may invest personal funds into a4i Inc. Shares are issued immediately with no vesting.

Relocation & Benefits

• Work policy: Office-first culture in Barcelona, with flexibility.
• Paid time off: 24 days annual leave plus public holidays, rising by one day per year of service to a maximum of 30.
• Learning support: We fund courses, conferences and certifications that help you develop, approved case by case.
• Equipment: Whatever you need to do the work properly.
• Team culture: Regular team events and genuine Dream Team collaboration.
• Flexible start date: We accommodate your notice period and, if needed, your move.

The Process

1. Intro call with Felix, founding team member
2. Interview with Sergi, our Co-Founder & CTO
3. Interview with Fabian, our CEO & Co-Founder
4. One-day trial with us in the Barcelona office