ML Encoder Lead

• ML Encoder Lead
• Location: San Francisco, CA

Onsite Flexibility: Hybrid

• Contract Details
• Position Type: Contract
• Contract Duration: 4 months
• Pay Rate: $80.00–$100.00 / Hour (USD)
• Work Authorization: Applicants must be authorized to work for ANY employer in the U.S. We are unable to sponsor or take over sponsorship of an employment Visa at this time.

• Job Summary
• Our client is seeking a senior hands-on ML Encoder Lead to design and train a shared customer representation model using large-scale longitudinal transaction, sales, and interaction data. This role will define the modeling objective, develop and evaluate encoder/embedding approaches, and determine whether the model provides meaningful downstream value for GenAI and analytics use cases.

• Key Responsibilities
• Design and train encoder or embedding models using longitudinal customer/event data.
• Define pretraining objectives, modeling approach, evaluation design, and success criteria.
• Build inductive representations that can support customers/entities with limited history.
• Evaluate model performance using time-based splits, cold-start slices, leakage detection, drift, calibration, and transfer to downstream tasks.
• Build production-ready training pipelines, data contracts, model versioning, serving, monitoring, and reproducibility practices.
• Present findings, uncertainty, limitations, and go/no-go recommendations to senior stakeholders.

• Required Skills
• Hands-on experience personally training encoder or embedding models.
• Deep expertise in representation learning, self-supervised or contrastive learning, sequence/temporal modeling, transformers, GNNs, or recommender embeddings.
• Experience with large, sparse, longitudinal event data such as transactions, claims, clickstream, customer journeys, or engagement histories.
• Strong Python, PyTorch or JAX, SQL, distributed data processing, and cloud model training experience.
• Strong evaluation discipline and ability to identify whether embeddings create true incremental signal.

• Preferred Skills
• Customer-360, behavioral embeddings, recommender systems, or foundation models over event data.
• Privacy, fairness, and re-identification risk experience.
• Publications, patents, or public applied work in representation learning.

• Work Environment / Physical Requirements
• Bay Area based, with ability to work onsite at least 3 days per week.
• The team's preference is for candidates to be based on the West Coast, ideally in San Francisco. Remote candidates will also be considered, provided they can work Pacific Time hours.

Benefits

• Medical, Vision, and Dental Insurance Plans
• 401k Retirement Fund

• About GTT
• GTT is a minority-owned staffing firm and a subsidiary of Chenega Corporation, a Native American-owned company in Alaska. We highly value diverse and inclusive workplaces and support Fortune 500 organizations across banking, financial services, technology, life sciences, biotech, utilities, and retail sectors throughout the U.S. and Canada.

Job Number: 26-11383