Senior Lead ML Encoder

Senior Lead ML EncoderSoftware 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.ResponsibilitiesThe 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 SkillsHas 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 modelDeep expertise in representation learning: self-supervised or contrastive pretraining, sequence and temporal modeling, transformers, graph neural networks or recommender embeddingsExperience modeling large, sparse, longitudinal event data such as transactions, claims, clickstream, customer journeys or engagement historiesExperience building inductive representations, so an entity with little history can be represented from its own features rather than a lookup tableRigorous evaluation practice: time-based splits, leakage detection, cold-start slices, transfer to held-out populations, stated uncertainty and hard baselinesAbility to judge whether an embedding carries genuine incremental signal downstream, including calibration, stability, drift and subgroup performanceStrong Python engineering with PyTorch or JAX, SQL, distributed data processing and cloud-based model training at scaleExperience carrying a model from research into production: data contracts, training pipelines, versioning, serving, monitoring and reproducibilityAbility to present findings and uncertainty credibly to senior stakeholders, and to recommend stopping an approach that is not workingPreferred SkillsExperience with customer-360 representations, behavioral embeddings, recommender systems or foundation models over event dataFamiliarity with privacy, fairness and re-identification risk in learned representations of individualsPublications, patents or public applied work in representation learningAny industry with large-scale behavioral event data is relevant — consumer technology, marketplaces, streaming, financial services, payments or advertising technology. Domain knowledge is not required.SGA is a women-owned business. We are a technology and resource solutions provider driven to stand out. 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. We are committed to providing access, equal opportunity, and reasonable accommodation for individuals with disabilities in employment, and our services, programs, and activities.