Senior Lead ML Encoder

Software Guidance & Assistance, Inc., (SGA), is searching for a Senior Lead ML Encoder for a contract assignment with one of our premier Pharmaceutical clients in South San Francisco, CA .

Responsibilities :

• The goal is to build the first shared learned representation of our customers - one dense vector per customer, trained on longitudinal transaction, sales and interaction history - that downstream GenAI and analytics products can reuse instead of each re-deriving its own view of the same market.
• Design the pretraining objective, train and evaluate the encoder, and produce the evidence that determines whether the approach continues.
• Evaluation is as much of the deliverable as the model.
• This is a hands-on senior contractor who must define the modeling objectives and evaluation design and write production code - not execute a specification handed to them.

Required Skills :

• Has personally trained an encoder or embedding model, including designing the pretraining objective - not only consumed pre-trained embeddings or fine-tuned a published large language model
• Deep expertise in representation learning: self-supervised or contrastive pretraining, sequence and temporal modeling, transformers, graph neural networks or recommender embeddings
• Experience modeling large, sparse, longitudinal event data such as transactions, claims, clickstream, customer journeys or engagement histories
• Experience building inductive representations, so an entity with little history can be represented from its own features rather than a lookup table
• Rigorous evaluation practice: time-based splits, leakage detection, cold-start slices, transfer to held-out populations, stated uncertainty and hard baselines
• Ability to judge whether an embedding carries genuine incremental signal downstream, including calibration, stability, drift and subgroup performance
• Strong Python engineering with PyTorch or JAX, SQL, distributed data processing and cloud-based model training at scale
• Experience carrying a model from research into production: data contracts, training pipelines, versioning, serving, monitoring and reproducibility
• Ability to present findings and uncertainty credibly to senior stakeholders, and to recommend stopping an approach that is not working

Preferred Skills :

• Experience with customer-360 representations, behavioral embeddings, recommender systems or foundation models over event data
• Familiarity with privacy, fairness and re-identification risk in learned representations of individuals
• Publications, patents or public applied work in representation learning
• Any industry with large-scale behavioral event data is relevant - consumer technology, marketplaces, streaming, financial services, payments or advertising technology. Domain knowledge is not required.

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SGA is a technology and resource solutions provider driven to stand out. We are a women-owned business. Our mission: to solve big IT problems with a more personal, boutique approach. Each year, we match consultants like you to more than 1,000 engagements. When we say let's work better together, we mean it. You'll join a diverse team built on these core values: customer service, employee development, and quality and integrity in everything we do. Be yourself, love what you do and find your passion at work. Please find us at .

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