Machine Learning Engineer - Persana AI

About Persana

Persana AI (YC W23) is revolutionizing how companies execute their go-to-market strategies with our innovative GTM agents. Our proprietary AI technology analyzes billions of data points across professionals, companies, and market signals to help sales teams identify high-probability prospects, engage the right decision-makers, and create personalized outreach that gets responses. Companies using our platform see 3-5x higher conversion rates while their sales teams spend 70% less time on prospecting.

The Opportunity

We're seeking an exceptional Machine Learning Engineer to join our AI team and help advance our agent-based technology. In this role, you'll work on developing and optimizing the core ML systems that power our GTM agents, focusing on embedding models, retrieval systems, and large language model applications. This is a unique opportunity to apply cutting-edge AI techniques to solve real business problems at scale.

What You'll Build

• Advanced embedding models that capture the semantic relationships between companies, people, and roles
• Sophisticated retrieval augmented generation (RAG) systems to ground our agents in factual data
• Fine-tuned language models for industry-specific tasks like prospect qualification and outreach generation
• Evaluation frameworks to measure and improve agent performance across multiple dimensions
• Production ML pipelines that can efficiently process and learn from billions of data points

Your Impact

• Shape the core AI technology that differentiates Persana in the market
• Develop novel approaches to improve agent reliability and reduce hallucinations
• Build systems that deliver measurable business value to our customers
• Collaborate with product and engineering to bring ML innovations into production
• Help define the future of AI-powered go-to-market execution

What We're Looking For

• 3+ years of professional experience in machine learning engineering
• Strong background in NLP, vector embeddings, and large language models
• Experience with PyTorch, Hugging Face, or similar ML frameworks
• Proficiency in Python and software engineering best practices
• Understanding of production ML systems and the challenges of deploying models at scale
• Knowledge of search and retrieval systems (vector databases, semantic search)
• Track record of solving complex problems with ML approaches

Bonus Points For

• Experience with embedding models like BERT, Sentence Transformers, or OpenAI embeddings
• Background in agent-based AI systems or autonomous workflows
• Familiarity with LLM fine-tuning techniques (RLHF, LoRA, QLoRA)
• Knowledge of information extraction from unstructured data
• Experience with B2B data or sales tech applications
• Contributions to research papers or open-source ML projects

Why Persana?

• Work with a founding team that combines domain expertise from LinkedIn, Shopify, and Element AI
• Solve challenging technical problems at the intersection of AI, search, and B2B sales
• Join at an inflection point - we're well-funded and scaling rapidly
• Competitive compensation
• Flexible work environment with the resources you need to do your best work

Our Stack

• ML/AI: PyTorch, Hugging Face Transformers, LangChain
• Data Processing: Python, Pandas, NumPy
• Search: OpenSearch, FAISS, Pinecone
• Backend: Node.js, Python, BullMQ for job queueing
• Infrastructure: AWS (SageMaker, Lambda, ECS), Docker