Machine Learning Engineer - Foundational

ABOUT US Harmattan AI is a next-generation defense prime building autonomous and scalable defense systems. Following the close of a $200M Series B, valuing the company at $1.4 billion, we are expanding our teams and capabilities to deliver mission-critical systems to allied forces. Our work is guided by clear values: building technologies with real-world impact, pursuing excellence in everything we do, setting ambitious goals, and taking on the hardest technical challenges. We operate in a demanding environment where rigor, ownership, and execution are expected. ABOUT THE ROLE Harmattan AI is heavily pushing the boundaries of autonomous systems, where the perception of the surrounding world through visual cues is a vital component. To make sense of incoming visual data and enable mission-critical downstream decisions, we have developed custom detection models. As our product and project portfolio expands, we are diversifying our efforts in this space across multiple embedded platforms. As an ML Research Engineer in the Detect&Track Distillation team, you will join us at a very early stage, giving you a unique opportunity to heavily influence the technical direction of the team. Operating out of Lausanne, Paris, or Zurich, you will focus on taking large foundation models and distilling them into highly optimized, task-specific components. Your work will span target detection, classification, and target re-identification across time, directly tackling the hardware inference constraints of diverse edge and embedded systems. RESPONSIBILITIES * Model Distillation & Finetuning: Take large foundation models and compress/distill them into highly specific, efficient components optimized for smaller tasks and target detection. * Edge AI Optimization: Optimize neural networks for constrained embedded systems using techniques such as quantization (PTQ vs. QAT), pruning, and LoRA. * Pipeline Management & MLOps: Build, heavily modify, and manage training, evaluation, and MLOps pipelines while ensuring reproducibility, robust logging, and version control. * Data Curation: Collaborate on data curation and the creation of task-specific datasets to constantly improve model accuracy. * Benchmarking & Evaluation: Framework-level benchmarking of newly distilled models to evaluate performance and latency, ensuring results are fully aligned with real-world operational deployments. * Research & Innovation: Stay at the absolute forefront of scientific trends in computer vision and quantization research to introduce cutting-edge methodologies to the team. * Cross-Functional Collaboration: Work closely with the Detect&Track Foundation team, downstream System Engineers, Project Teams, and Mission Intelligence to deliver robust solutions. * Mentorship: Depending on seniority, support the team by managing or mentoring junior engineers. CANDIDATE REQUIREMENTS * Educational Background: A strong academic record with a degree in a STEM field (e.g., Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics). * Deep Learning & Computer Vision: Proven experience running vision neural networks, developing target detection architectures, or managing re-identification tasks. * Model Compression & Edge AI: Hands-on expertise in knowledge distillation, model compression, and deploying networks onto highly constrained embedded systems or edge hardware (e.g., Jetson, custom NPUs, wearables). * Technical Competence & Infrastructure: Proficiency in MLOps, GPU compute, and building infrastructure (such as training pipeline templates and loggers). * Professional Attributes: * Highly structured, analytical, task-aligned, and research-oriented. * Excellent communication and influence skills, with the ability to effectively translate and present complex benchmarking data to downstream users and senior stakeholders. * Thrives under pressure in a fast-paced environment with a “no-task-is-too-small” mentality toward building foundational team infrastructure. * Commitment: 100% dedication to Harmattan AI’s mission, vision, and ambitious growth plans, ready to go the extra mile to ensure operational excellence We look forward to hearing how you can help shape the future of autonomous defense systems at Harmattan AI.

Vestiaire Collective is the leading global platform for desirable pre-loved fashion and a pioneer in transforming how people consume fashion.   Our mission is simple: make circular fashion the norm, not the exception. Through technology, expertise, and a highly engaged global community, we enable millions of people to buy and sell fashion in a more sustainable way.   Founded in Paris in 2009, Vestiaire Collective is now a globally scaled marketplace with offices in Paris, London, Berlin, New York, Singapore, and Ho Chi Minh City, and logistics hubs across Europe, Asia, and the US. Today, we are a team of around 600 people from over 50 nationalities, united by a shared ambition: to drive meaningful change in the fashion industry.   Our values, Activism, Transparency, Dedication, Greatness, and Collective, shape how we build, collaborate, and grow every day. About the Role We are seeking a Foundational Machine Learning Engineer for a high-impact greenfield opportunity to build our MLOps infrastructure from the ground up at Vestiaire Collective. While driving our AI authentication initiatives (deploying multi-model approaches including computer vision for luxury product authentication and counterfeit detection) will be your immediate focus, your long-term mission will be to scale foundational architecture across the entire marketplace. You will expand our ML capabilities to power broader domains, primarily focusing on search and recommendation systems, with future expansions into dynamic pricing and marketing technologies. Acting as the bridge among Applied Science, Data Platform, and Backend Engineering, you will design robust, decoupled architectures and spearhead the MLOps strategy with our Director of Data, prioritizing system maintainability, engineering hygiene, and the reliable deployment of complex models, ensuring all our ML models across the board deliver high-throughput, low-latency business impact. What You Will Do Short-Term Impact (First 6 Months): Partner closely with the Operations squads and Data Scientists to accelerate ML and RAG prototypes into resilient, production-ready code. You will directly integrate with the team to deploy, optimize, and scale heavy-width CV and VLM models focused on fraud detection and luxury product authentication, immediately improving our trust and safety ecosystem. Mid-Term Foundation (MLOps Lifecycle & Infrastructure): Lead the end-to-end foundational groundwork of our ML lifecycle by designing robust systems for Data & Feature Management, Model Tracking & Registry, and Model Serving & Monitoring. You will scale infrastructure by automating continuous retraining pipelines that handle diverse deployment cadences (from daily fraud detection to weekly recommendations), design resilient multi-model architectures, and critically evaluate the technical overhead and TCO of our in-house tools against enterprise-grade platforms to ensure long-term resilience. Long-Term Vision (Centralizing 360-Degree MLE Capabilities): Act as a pioneer and cornerstone hire for the ML engineering discipline at Vestiaire Collective, setting the technical standards to help scale the AI/ML organization. You will transition into a centralized foundational role, moving beyond single-squad operations to mentor the team and provide horizontal ML infrastructure support to multiple domains, including Search, Discovery, Pricing, Marketing, and Data Platforms. Who You Are Must-Haves: Experience: 5-8+ years of hands-on experience in Machine Learning Engineering, specifically focused on building and scaling MLOps infrastructure and productionizing ML systems. Production Infrastructure: Proven expertise in deploying low-latency, high-throughput ML inference services (using FastAPI, TorchServe, Triton Inference Server, or Ray Serve) across both classical lightweight and heavy-width ML models (PyTorch/TensorFlow). Strong preference for AWS (EKS, EC2, SageMaker) / Snowflake and Open Source ecosystems over GCP/Azure. MLOps & Pipelines: Deep experience building automated, continuous model retraining pipelines to handle concept drift (ranging from daily to weekly cycles). You have orchestrated decoupled, multi-model AI architectures using tools like Airflow, Kubeflow, or Metaflow, and possess strong expertise in model registry and tracking tools like MLflow or Weights & Biases. Feature Stores: Hands-on experience evaluating, building, or extensively leveraging online (Redis, DynamoDB) and offline (Snowflake, S3) Feature Stores in a production environment. Familiarity with frameworks like Feast or custom dbt-based pipelines is highly valued. Strategic Builder Mindset: You are an analytical builder who thinks long-term. You can successfully evaluate TCO for bespoke internal systems versus enterprise tools, anticipate technical liabilities, and design robust architectures that handle unpredictable peak traffic surges. Collaboration & Engineering Hygiene: Strong cross-functional communication skills. You excel at translating complex ML prototypes into highly scalable production code backed by strict version control, rigorous testing, and CI/CD best practices, seamlessly connecting data science innovation with backend engineering execution. Nice-to-Haves: Relevant Domain Expertise: Background in E-commerce, Single-SKU Marketplaces, Search & Recommendation, Trust & Safety, or Counterfeit Detection. Vision, Edge & Optimization: Hands-on experience with Vector Databases, Visual RAG pipelines, deploying Deep Learning VLM models, and optimizing models for edge computing or low-latency inference (e.g., ONNX, TensorRT). Infrastructure & Observability: Advanced experience with containerization (Docker, Kubernetes), Infrastructure as Code (Terraform), and data transformation workflows (dbt). Familiarity with setting up advanced monitoring for model performance, concept drift, and system health (Datadog, Prometheus).