Machine Learning Team Leader

Our client is a global leader in cybersecurity for IT, OT, and ICS critical infrastructure. Their end-to-end platform gives enterprises and public sector organizations the critical advantage they need to protect complex networks, secure devices, and meet compliance requirements.

Over the past 20 years, a consistent commitment to innovative technology has earned the trust of more than 1,700 organizations, governments, and institutions worldwide — cementing the company's role in protecting the world's critical infrastructure and securing our way of life.

Lead, mentor, and empower a team of ML Engineers to own model quality end-to-end—from initial experimentation to a production-ready, handoff-able artifact—for AI/ML detection portfolio, spanning MetaDefender Aether (Threat Pattern Correlator, URL Reputation Predictor, Brand Spoofing Detector, and Web Threat Analyzer).

Your Role Will be:

• People & Performance Management: Conduct regular 1-on-1s to foster career development, provide continuous constructive feedback, remove blockers, and ensure the team's overall well-being
• Daily Work Organization: Drive the team's execution rhythms by leading task prioritization, sprint planning, and resource allocation to ensure predictable, high-quality delivery
• Cross-Functional Representation: Champion the team's achievements and roadmap to stakeholders, acting as the primary technical liaison and aligning efforts with Data Science, Development, and Product management teams
• Technical Roadmap Ownership: Lead model experimentation strategies, prioritizing architectural improvements based on measurable detection accuracy gains and business impact
• End-to-End Model Development: Guide the design, training, fine-tuning, and evaluation of ML models across diverse detection modalities (malware similarity search, URL reputation, phishing/brand-spoofing image analysis, and web threat classification)
• Quality & Release Standards: Define model quality metrics, evaluation datasets, and acceptance criteria. Establish strict model release contracts (versioned, runtime-portable artifacts like ONNX, performance benchmarks) for the Java-based Aether backend
• Production Readiness: Ensure all deployed models meet rigorous operational constraints across cloud, offline, air-gapped, and embedded deployment tiers

Requirements

• Proven experience directly managing or leading technical teams, including conducting 1-on-1s, managing performance, and organizing daily workflows
• 3+ years applied ML experience across at least two of: text/content classification, computer vision, similarity search/embedding models, malware, or threat detection
• Strong proficiency in Python and frameworks like PyTorch or TensorFlow, alongside deep experience with model evaluation frameworks
• Demonstrated history of shipping models consumed by other engineering teams with clean, well-documented handoff contracts