Senior Machine Learning Engineer

About Ontra

Ontra is the leader in AI-powered solutions for the private markets. Powered by industry-leading AI, data from over 2 million contracts, and a global network of legal professionals, Ontra automates critical private market workflows across the fund lifecycle. Ontra’s solutions transform unstructured data trapped in static documents into actionable intelligence, enabling firms to accelerate contracts, streamline compliance, and automate entity management. Trusted by more than 1,000 global GPs, investment banks, law firms, and advisors – including nine of the top ten PEI-ranked firms worldwide – Ontra helps firms focus on what’s important.

Our Culture

Ontra is a remote-first company that values the power of connection. We find innovative ways to stay connected, both virtually and in person. By promoting ownership, inspiring creativity, and championing collaboration, Ontra enables you to shape your impact and growth. Our commitment to innovation extends beyond our technology; it’s embedded in our culture, and AI plays a crucial role in everything we do.

Our culture is one where belonging is the cornerstone of every interaction, rooted in acceptance and respect for all. Our commitment to inclusion begins at the application process, ensuring a fair and equitable hiring experience that values the unique contributions you bring from day one.

About the Role

Ontra is seeking a Senior Machine Learning Engineer reporting to our Head of Machine Learning.

For this job, we are currently only hiring candidates based in the United States. We’re looking for someone excited to revolutionize legal tech by designing and scaling advanced machine learning systems, with a focus on extraction, suggestion, graph representation and visualization, and search of legal entities from complex legal documents.

If you are an innovative and analytical thinker with deep expertise in NLP, Knowledge Graph, and AI search, who thrives on solving complex, domain-specific challenges through advanced machine learning techniques, we’d love to get to know you!

What You’ll Do

• ML System Design: Design, build, and scale advanced machine learning systems to automate the extraction of legal obligations and private equity relationships from complex private equity documents.
• Model Development: Develop and fine-tune LLM solutions for legal workflows, enhancing the capabilities of Ontra’s AI systems with custom NER pipelines and AI search.
• Collaboration and Integration: Work closely with product, design, data science, legal, and engineering teams to define project requirements and seamlessly integrate AI solutions into existing workflows.
• Data and Pipeline Management: Review and refine datasets and machine learning pipelines to ensure they deliver high performance, scalability, and are tailored to evolving needs.
• Production Deployment: Deploy and continuously monitor machine learning models in production, conducting experiments and implementing optimizations to improve model performance.
• Workflow Improvement: Drive measurable improvements in legal review processes and enhance end-user productivity through advanced AI applications and tools.

What You’ll Bring

• Experience: 5+ years in applied machine learning or NLP roles.
• Technical Expertise: Proficient understanding of transformer-based architectures, embeddings, and document-level NLP.
• Production Deployment: Demonstrated experience in deploying ML models in production environments, including the use of orchestration and monitoring tools.
• AI Search Proficiency: Familiarity with AI search, vector stores (e.g. OpenSearch, Pinecone, Weaviate), or hybrid RAG systems.
• Educational Background: Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field preferred.

Pay Transparency

Ontra takes individual candidate location, experience, and skills into consideration when determining compensation. The base pay range is listed below.

Some positions may be eligible for additional compensation, such as commission, variable compensation, profits interest units, or other equity-based compensation, which are not included in the below base pay range.

If you are selected to participate in our interview process, your Talent Acquisition Partner will share more details about the total compensation package for the role.

Base Pay Range$230,400—$345,600 USD

Hiring Locations

We currently hire exclusively in the locations listed below. Select jobs may have more specific location requirements due to business needs.

• United States: Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Kansas, Massachusetts, Maryland, Minnesota, North Carolina, New Jersey, Nevada, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Washington
• APAC: Hong Kong
• EMEA: United Kingdom

Benefits Snapshot

• Remote-first by design, with regular in-person gatherings and hub spaces in NYC, Santa Barbara, and London
• Twice yearly team offsites for in-person collaboration
• Paid flexible time off policy
• Paid parental leave and benefits
• Employer-supported retirement contributions, varying by country
• Monthly phone and internet reimbursement
• Pick Your Perk stipend to spend on what matters most to you, from well-being and gym memberships, to home office setup, student loans, pet care, and more
• Company-sponsored LinkedIn Learning accounts, department budgets for professional development, and robust onboarding program
• Various options for medical, dental, and vision insurance

Travel

Occasional travel is required for Ontra employees, including typically at least twice per year to attend team and larger group off-sites for in-person collaboration. For some roles, additional travel may be required based on the requirements of the role and business need.

Inclusivity

Ontra is committed to the full inclusion of all qualified individuals. As part of this commitment, Ontra will ensure that persons with disabilities are provided reasonable accommodations. If reasonable accommodation is needed to participate in the job application or interview process, to perform essential job functions, and/or to receive other benefits and privileges of employment, please contact people@ontra.ai.

Key skills/competency

• Machine Learning
• Natural Language Processing (NLP)
• Large Language Models (LLM)
• Knowledge Graph
• AI Search
• Transformer Architectures
• Vector Stores
• Data Pipelines
• Production ML
• System Design