Machine Learning and Coding Expert (SME)

Job Summary: Machine Learning and Coding Expert (SME)

Meridial Marketplace, by Invisible, is seeking a highly experienced Machine Learning and Coding Expert (SME) to serve as a consultant on AI training data projects for leading AI model builders and enterprises. In this freelance project role, you will define success criteria, review outputs, and provide targeted guidance to improve the quality and speed of domain-specific annotated datasets. Your direct contributions will ensure the successful delivery of datasets that meet the highest technical standards, engaging on specific projects with clearly defined deliverables, milestones, and end dates.

Key Responsibilities and Components

As a Machine Learning and Coding Expert (SME), your role will encompass several critical areas:

Technical Standard Setting, Quality Control, and Process Improvement

• Define domain-specific quality success metrics for AI training data.
• Develop project-specific Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs), QA rubrics, and reference materials tailored to client technical standards.
• Review project outputs, including code annotations and model configurations, ensuring adherence to technical standards and correcting defects.
• Perform structured QA passes on daily/weekly deliverables, promptly flagging, tracking, and resolving defects to meet deadlines.
• Provide precise remediation notes to contractors for work improvement.
• Offer advisory input on tools, frameworks, workflows, and processes to achieve quality benchmarks.
• Handle specification changes and edge-case scenarios, drafting acceptance criteria or technical workarounds.
• Curate "gold standard" example libraries for scripts, models, and dataset annotations to ensure calibration and comparability.

Talent Vetting & Output Improvement

• Participate in vetting and assessing technical contractor talent for projects through code review tests and ML task evaluations.
• Review contractor sample work, providing precise, actionable written feedback for output enhancement.
• Create targeted training or calibration resources, such as best practices for clean code, hyperparameter tuning guidelines, and dataset preparation standards.

Project Delivery Support

• Advise on technical scoping and requirements during project setup, including programming languages, ML frameworks, and data preprocessing pipelines.
• Provide expert guidance for technical exceptions, edge cases, and specification changes throughout the project lifecycle.
• Contribute to post-project reviews to capture lessons learned and improve future standards.
• Identify and summarize client model observations and insights, such as model accuracy drift, overfitting patterns, or data leakage issues.
• Build dashboards or trackers with defect categories and recurrence to surface production insights that improve project outcomes.
• Conduct post-mortems, analyze defect trends, and propose process tweaks or training refreshers.

Target Profile: What We're Looking For

• Deep technical expertise with 5+ years of professional experience in software engineering, machine learning, or data science, demonstrating industry impact.
• Mastery of one or more programming languages (e.g., Python, C++, Java) and experience with leading ML frameworks (e.g., PyTorch, TensorFlow, scikit-learn).
• Proven ability to set, enforce, and maintain high technical standards in software development and ML workflows.
• Strong communication skills to deliver clear technical guidance to both engineers and non-technical stakeholders.
• Experience in producing technical documentation, quality rubrics, or training resources.
• Ability to work within fixed project timelines and scope, demonstrating strong attention to detail, documentation discipline, and commitment to accuracy and consistency.
• Fluency in spoken and written English, with clear and concise writing skills.

Example Data Annotation Potential Scope

This role may involve expertise across various machine learning fields and agent task specialties, including:

• Machine Learning: Model training/explanation, bias detection, evaluation metric analysis.
• Deep Learning: Neural network architecture design, backpropagation walkthroughs.
• Natural Language Processing (NLP): Text classification, summarization, sentiment analysis.
• Computer Vision: Image labeling, object detection, image captioning.
• MLOps / Deployment: Model lifecycle support, pipeline design, monitoring/rollback flows.
• Statistical Modeling: Hypothesis testing, regression diagnostics, p-value calculation.
• Data Engineering: Data pipeline logic, cleaning steps, schema validation.
• Feature Engineering: Variable selection, encoding/normalization strategies.
• Time Series Analysis: Forecast modeling, anomaly detection.
• Recommender Systems: User/item embedding design, collaborative filtering support.
• Explainable AI (XAI): SHAP/LIME interpretation, fairness flagging.
• Data Storytelling: Generating readable summaries from charts or model outputs.

Familiarity with tools such as TensorFlow, PyTorch, JAX, and HuggingFace is highly valued.

Compensation and Work Arrangement

This is a remote, contract position offering a pay range of $25 to $100 per hour, with the exact rate based on your experience, expertise, and geographic location. As a contractor, you will be responsible for supplying your own secure computer and high-speed internet; company-sponsored benefits such as health insurance and PTO do not apply.

Key skills/competency

• Machine Learning
• Coding/Software Engineering
• Quality Assurance (QA)
• Technical Standards
• AI Training Data
• Python
• TensorFlow
• PyTorch
• NLP/Computer Vision
• Data Science