AI/ML Lead Architect

Client of Austin Werner

AI/ML Lead Architect Large Language Model (LLM) Development

Location: Flexible (Remote)

We are a forward-thinking firm embarking on the development of a proprietary, fully owned Large Language Model (LLM) tailored to deliver transformative solutions in three specialized sectors: Legal Services & Documentation, Healthcare & Medical Analysis, and Business Intelligence & Analytics. The resulting model will be linguistically versatile, supporting both Arabic and English content, and architected for deployment in cloud and on-premises environments.

Role Overview:

As the AI/ML Lead Architect, you will play a central role in steering the technical design, training strategy, and deployment of an advanced transformer-based language model. You will work across all stages of the LLM lifecycle: from data curation and model design to distributed training, fine-tuning, optimization, and production deployment. This role demands both technical depth and a vision for innovating specialized, domain-specific AI solutions.

Key Responsibilities for the AI/ML Lead Architect :

• Design and architect advanced transformer-based LLMs tailored for legal, healthcare, and business analytics domains.
• Lead and mentor a high-caliber team of researchers and engineers throughout the model development lifecycle.
• Oversee the preparation and curation of large-scale multilingual (Arabic/English) datasets relevant to target domains.
• Spearhead fine-tuning and training of LLMs from scratch, with a focus on domain specialization.
• Implement and optimize distributed training frameworks (e.g., DeepSpeed, FairScale, Horovod) for scalable model development.
• Apply state-of-the-art techniques in attention mechanisms, tokenization, model quantization, pruning, and deployment optimization.
• Evaluate and iterate on open-source models such as LLaMA (2/3), Mistral, CodeLlama, Alpaca, leveraging their architectures and adapting them for proprietary needs.
• Work closely with product stakeholders to ensure solutions are deployable both on cloud and on-premises environments.
• Establish best practices for model evaluation, benchmarking, and responsible AI deployment, particularly around sensitive legal and medical data.
• Document technical designs and processes for knowledge sharing and regulatory compliance.

Required Qualifications for the AI/ML Lead Architect :

• 5+ years experience in AI/ML research and development with a specialization in modern transformer architectures (e.g., GPT, BERT, T5, LLaMA, Mitsral).
• Proven expertise in LLM fine-tuning and original model training.
• Robust experience with distributed training frameworks (DeepSpeed, FairScale, Horovod, or similar).
• In-depth understanding of attention mechanisms, tokenization, and optimization strategies for large neural models.
• Demonstrable hands-on work with major open-source LLMs (LLaMA 2/3, Mistral, CodeLlama, Alpaca, etc.).
• Experience with model quantization, pruning, and deployment optimization to achieve efficient inference on diverse hardware.
• Record of domain-specific LLM projects within legal, healthcare/medical, or business analytics/finance sectors.
• Comfortable working in multilingual environments, especially with datasets and content in Arabic and English.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Advanced degree (MSc/PhD) in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, or related fields.
• Familiarity with data privacy, compliance, and model interpretability in regulated domains.
• Exposure to multi-modal AI (optional but valued).