Staff ML Engineer – AI Equity Research

About the role

Versant, which owns StockStory (now part of CNBC), is building AI-powered equity research for individual investors. It is looking for a Staff ML Engineer in Prague to lead the design and delivery of large-scale, production AI systems. The role suits someone who combines deep machine learning expertise with strong software engineering and architectural judgment, and who wants direct access to experienced market professionals, including former hedge fund managers and top-tier analysts.

Key responsibilities

• Lead the architecture and implementation of production ML and AI systems used at scale
• Drive technical strategy for AI across multiple product areas
• Design end-to-end systems covering data pipelines, training workflows, inference services, evaluation and monitoring
• Own and deliver high-impact projects with significant ambiguity
• Provide technical leadership through design reviews, mentorship and cross-team collaboration
• Identify and mitigate systemic risks in AI systems, including performance regressions, bias and operational failure modes
• Guide model lifecycle management, monitoring and evaluation practices

Required profile

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or equivalent practical experience
• 8+ years of experience in software engineering focused on machine learning or AI systems
• Prior experience leading or founding an AI systems team
• Proven experience with LLMs, ranking or recommendation systems, search or applied NLP
• Ability to lead technical initiatives across teams and share ML knowledge

Required skills

• Strong proficiency in Python, TypeScript or Java
• Neural networks such as CNNs, RNNs, Transformers or other deep learning architectures
• NLP techniques such as tokenization, sequence labeling, language modeling, embeddings, text classification and information extraction
• Large-scale training pipelines with TensorFlow or PyTorch
• Human-in-the-loop training or evaluation workflows

The role is full-time and based in Prague; day-to-day work follows Versant's structure, with local employment handled by an Employer of Record.