Lead AI Engineer (Remote, Europe)

Nillion is humanity’s first Blind Computer. It is powered by a decentralized network of nodes that enables “Blind Computation” through the coordination and orchestration of privacy enhancing technologies (PETs) such as multi-party computation (MPC) and homomorphic encryption (HE). Nillion believes Blind Computation will become the internet’s base layer for all private data as PETs continue to mature. including the Founder of Indiegogo (Slava Rubin), Associate General Counsel of Coinbase  (Lindsay Danas Cohen), Co-Founder of Hedera Hashgraph (Andrew Masanto) and several other high profile team members.

We’re looking for a Lead AI Engineer with a strong background in generative AI models and an interest in Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PET). The ideal candidate will explore the intersection of generative AI and MPC, developing new techniques and methodologies that allow for secure, distributed AI computations. You will be working with the Nillion Product team and report to Nillion’s AI Product Lead. 

Essential Requirements

• Experience in a technical role which involved developing, fine-tuning and/or deploying AI systems at scale
• Experience leading highly technical teams and/or projects (strong plus if AI-related)
• In-depth understanding of recent transformer architectures / LLMs and their technical implementations
• Familiarity with and/or experience using more traditional ML models such as BERT, CNNs, random forests, etc.
• Strong ability to think both technically about specific challenges, research questions, etc. and strategically about high-level direction, roadmap, etc.
• Ability to effectively communicate complex concepts to internal/external stakeholders with various backgrounds
• Ability to effectively balance long-term research and short-term pragmatism
• Proficiency in Python and related AI/ML frameworks & technologies (i.e., PyTorch, HuggingFace, Docker, etc.).
• MSc or PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Mathematics, or a related field.

Desirable requirements

• Previous experience at a high-growth startup
• Previous deeptech experience
• Strong entrepreneurial drive
• Experience in or passion for cryptography, multi-party computation (MPC), confidential computing and/or other privacy-preserving technologies
• Excitement about the concept of fully privacy-preserving AI
• Contributions to open-source projects in the AI or privacy tech space

Responsibilities

• You will design & execute a technical AI roadmap towards bridging the gap between AI and confidential computing, in close collaboration with our AI and cryptography team
• You will work closely with our cryptography team, getting up to speed with the technical nuances & implementing AI models accordingly
• You will adapt AI model architectures to work in a performant way under a confidential computing paradigm and technically implement these architectures in our AI toolkit
• You will have regular touchpoints with AI developers on the Nillion network and integrate their feedback in our AI roadmap
• You will work closely with our DevRel team and actively contribute to creating easy-to-use AI tools and suitable AI development workflows