Machine Learning Team Leader

About this role

Our client is a global leader in cybersecurity for IT, OT, and ICS critical infrastructure. Their end-to-end platform gives enterprises and public sector organizations the critical advantage they need to protect complex networks, secure devices, and meet compliance requirements.
Over the past 20 years, a consistent commitment to innovative technology has earned the trust of more than 1,700 organizations, governments, and institutions worldwide — cementing the company's role in protecting the world's critical infrastructure and securing our way of life.
Lead, mentor, and empower a team of ML Engineers to own model quality end-to-end—from initial experimentation to a production-ready, handoff-able artifact—for AI/ML detection portfolio, spanning MetaDefender Aether (Threat Pattern Correlator, URL Reputation Predictor, Brand Spoofing Detector, and Web Threat Analyzer).

Your Role Will be:

• People & Performance Management: Conduct regular 1-on-1s to foster career development, provide continuous constructive feedback, remove blockers, and ensure the team's overall well-being

• Daily Work Organization: Drive the team's execution rhythms by leading task prioritization, sprint planning, and resource allocation to ensure predictable, high-quality delivery

• Cross-Functional Representation: Champion the team's achievements and roadmap to stakeholders, acting as the primary technical liaison and aligning efforts with Data Science, Development, and Product management teams

• Technical Roadmap Ownership: Lead model experimentation strategies, prioritizing architectural improvements based on measurable detection accuracy gains and business impact

• End-to-End Model Development: Guide the design, training, fine-tuning, and evaluation of ML models across diverse detection modalities (malware similarity search, URL reputation, phishing/brand-spoofing image analysis, and web threat classification)

• Quality & Release Standards: Define model quality metrics, evaluation datasets, and acceptance criteria. Establish strict model release contracts (versioned, runtime-portable artifacts like ONNX, performance benchmarks) for the Java-based Aether backend

• Production Readiness: Ensure all deployed models meet rigorous operational constraints across cloud, offline, air-gapped, and embedded deployment tiers
Requirements

• Proven experience directly managing or leading technical teams, including conducting 1-on-1s, managing performance, and organizing daily workflows

• 3+ years applied ML experience across at least two of: text/content classification, computer vision, similarity search/embedding models, malware, or threat detection

• Strong proficiency in Python and frameworks like PyTorch or TensorFlow, alongside deep experience with model evaluation frameworks

• Demonstrated history of shipping models consumed by other engineering teams with clean, well-documented handoff contracts

• Solid grounding in statistics and rigorous experiment design

Nice to have

• Security ML domain experience (malware family classification, phishing detection, URL reputation)

• Experience with model compression or quantization for offline and embedded environments
Benefits

• Stable, growing international company background with an exceptional customer group

• Opportunity to improve your professional skills

• The newest technology environment

• Language course and opportunity for active recreation – kettlebell, football and office massage

• Attractive working environment – nice office full of accessories (fruits every day, coffee, breakfast, tea etc.)

• Regular team events and Happy Hour activities