Senior NLP Engineer

Job title:
Senior NLP Engineer

Reporting to:
Technical Lead

Location:
Edinburgh / Remote (within the UK)

Aveni is an award-winning technology company.
We use advanced AI to enable scalable efficiency for financial services companies, combining world-leading Natural Language Processing (NLP) expertise with deep financial services domain experience to drive enterprise-wide productivity.
Aveni harnesses the power of voice to drive unprecedented efficiency and oversight.
We're using the latest in AI to automate and innovate, empowering businesses to achieve exceptional productivity and compliance outcomes.

Purpose of the role

Aveni is in its high growth phase, and we currently have an excellent opportunity for a Senior NLP Engineer to join us to drive innovative projects forward and solve complex industry problems along the way.
Joining at an extremely exciting time for the business, this role will play a pivotal role in our ambition to deliver across multiple truly transformational projects.
As a flavour of what's to come, your inaugural project will help revolutionise the application of Natural Language Processing to Financial Services in the UK.

Key responsibilities

We are looking for an enthusiastic, experienced NLP Engineer who is keen to shape an exciting project with huge commercial potential.
The successful candidate will work on the development of a family of Large Language Models (LLMs) for Financial Services in the UK.

You'll be working closely with other AI researchers, data analysts, software engineers and product managers, developing truly disruptive products that are changing the way the world communicates.

About you

As a Senior NLP Engineer at Aveni, you are an accomplished professional with a passion for leveraging AI and NLP technologies to drive innovation within the financial services sector.
You thrive on solving complex industry challenges through the development and deployment of cutting-edge language models.
Your expertise and enthusiasm will be instrumental in shaping and delivering transformative projects that redefine the application of NLP in financial services across the UK.

You have a proven track record in sourcing and curating diverse datasets relevant to financial services, utilising various data sources including web scraping, APIs, databases, and proprietary repositories.
Your meticulous attention to detail ensures data quality and integrity throughout the preprocessing phase.

You excel in training and fine-tuning neural network-based language models, leveraging large-scale text corpora to optimise model performance for specific NLP tasks.
Your experience extends to selecting appropriate model architectures, hyperparameters, and training strategies.

Proficient in Python, you possess strong knowledge of data science libraries and deep learning frameworks.
You are adept at handling unstructured data and applying advanced algorithms to extract meaningful insights.
Your familiarity with software development best practices, version control systems, and agile methodologies enables you to collaborate effectively with cross-functional teams to deliver robust, scalable solutions.

Ideally, you bring experience in applying NLP within the financial services industry, demonstrating a nuanced understanding of industry-specific challenges and opportunities.

Knowledge, skills, and qualifications

Rather than require specific education or backgrounds, we're looking for evidence of the following:

• Proven experience in sourcing and collecting diverse and representative datasets relevant to the target domain, such as financial services.
• Familiarity with various data sources, including web scraping, public repositories, APIs, databases, and proprietary data sources within the financial services industry.
• Strong attention to detail and ability to perform thorough quality assurance checks on collected and preprocessed data to detect and correct errors, inconsistencies, and anomalies.
• Experience in validating data integrity, relevance, and suitability for specific NLP tasks through exploratory data analysis (EDA) and validation against ground truth or domain knowledge.
• Demonstrated experience in training neural network-based language models from scratch using large-scale text corpora.
• Proficiency in selecting appropriate model architectures, hyperparameters, and training strategies to optimize model performance for specific NLP tasks.
• Proficient with data structures and algorithms, with good experience handling unstructured data.
• Sound knowledge and experience of core Python, data science libraries such as Numpy, Pandas and Scipy and deep learning frameworks Keras, TensorFlow and/or PyTorch.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, with the ability to tackle complex challenges in NLP and develop innovative solutions.
• Familiarity with software development best practices, version control systems (e.g., Git), and agile methodologies.
• Good communication skills

And, ideally:

• Experience training/fine-tuning LLMs
• Experience applying NLP to the Financial Services industry.
• Understanding of CI/CD & Devops principles.
• Experience working with cloud environments, ideally AWS.
• Experience deploying machine learning / deep learning algorithms into production with a good grasp of architecture and how best to integrate machine learning into backend services.

Benefits

This is a great opportunity to work at the cutting edge of Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing and software development.
Alongside a competitive salary, we also offer:

• 34 days holiday plus your birthday off
• Strong career progression opportunities
• Share options
• Remote and flexible working
• On-going career development and training
• Freebies and discounts (Free coffee, movie downloads, discounts on high street stores, supermarkets, and restaurants)
• Emotional wellbeing (Employee assistance programme provides access to 24/7 employee counselling and emotional support)
• Physical health (Access to fitness portal including HIIT workout, boxing, yoga as well as gym discounts)
• Pension scheme

Join Us in Making a Difference:

At Aveni, we believe that diversity drives innovation.
We're committed to building a team that reflects the diverse communities we serve and creating an inclusive workplace where everyone feels valued and empowered to contribute their best work.
If you're passionate about leveraging technology to drive positive change and want to be part of a team that's shaping the future of financial services, we'd love to hear from you.
We know that some people are likely to only apply where they meet 100% of requirements, but we'd like to hear from you anyway.
Apply now to join us on our mission to transform the financial services indus.