Senior AI Engineer, AI Lab

Senior AI Engineer, AI Lab Overview

The Economist Group is seeking a Senior AI Engineer to join its AI Lab in London. This full-time position is pivotal in exploring how generative AI can transform journalism at The Economist. As part of a small team, you will focus on developing and refining large language models (LLMs) that align with the editorial voice of The Economist, influencing how millions of readers engage with our content.

Key Responsibilities

• Refine large language models (LLMs) to align with The Economist’s editorial tone and style.
• Design, curate, and manage datasets for fine-tuning, including overseeing versioning and annotation processes.
• Develop and assess retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines that utilize structured content.
• Prototype and evaluate text-to-speech (TTS) systems for audio-first applications using tools like ElevenLabs and OpenAI TTS.
• Collaborate with infrastructure, frontend, and design teams to deliver internal tools and demonstrations that showcase generative AI capabilities.
• Manage quality evaluation processes using metrics such as BLEU, ROUGE, and custom evaluations, incorporating human feedback.
• Support product experiments that involve real-time content generation, summarization, or personalization.
• Work closely with journalists and editors to create innovative evaluation metrics that reflect The Economist’s unique tone and style.

Qualifications

• A minimum of three years of experience in building applications with LLMs or natural language processing (NLP) pipelines, preferably with tools like OpenAI, Claude, or HuggingFace.
• Experience in supervised fine-tuning (SFT), prompt tuning, or instruction tuning on proprietary datasets.
• Strong understanding of various fine-tuning methodologies, including reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) and reinforcement learning from AI feedback (RLAIF).
• Proficient in Python, especially with libraries such as LangChain, HuggingFace Transformers, and data manipulation tools like Pandas.
• Ability to define and monitor generation quality using evaluation metrics like BLEU and ROUGE, and to create editorial-specific evaluators.
• Familiarity with speech-to-text (STT) and text-to-speech (TTS) tools for prototyping purposes.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to work effectively with editorial and product teams.
• A curious and exploratory mindset, comfortable navigating ambiguity and pushing the limits of generative AI.

Benefits

• Highly competitive pension or 401(k) plan.
• Private health insurance coverage.
• 24/7 access to counseling and wellbeing resources through the Employee Assistance Program.
• Work From Anywhere program allowing up to 25 days of remote work per year.
• Generous annual leave and parental leave policies.
• Dedicated days off for volunteering and moving home.
• Complimentary access to all The Economist content, including subscriptions, apps, and podcasts.

This role operates on a hybrid working pattern, requiring attendance at the office for three or more days each week. If you are passionate about leveraging AI to innovate journalism and meet the qualifications outlined, we encourage you to apply.

Degree Requirement: Not Specified

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