Machine Learning Lead

Social Discovery Group (SDG) is a group of social discovery companies. SDG solves the problems of loneliness, isolation, and disconnection - transforming virtual intimacy into the new normal. SDG’s products redefine the way people interact and connect with one another.

Our portfolio includes social entertainment platforms designed to connect people online across different cultures and regions of the world. We bring together a team of like-minded people and IT professionals who specialize in creating and developing globally impactful social discovery products.

Our international team of digital nomads works remotely from all over the world. We’re proud to be a two-time “Great Place to Work” winner (USA & Japan, 2024–2025) and a Top-5 Company for Work-From-Anywhere Jobs (FlexJobs, 2025). We are looking for Machine Learning Lead .

Your main tasks will be: Own the ML strategy for dialogue systems: decide what to build and in what order, and tie those bets to business metrics (ARPU, retention, chat depth). Lead a team of 3 ML engineers — set the technical bar, distribute work, hire and let go, grow the people you keep.

Drive LLM post-training and model adaptation end to end: SFT, LoRA/QLoRA, preference optimization (DPO / ORPO / SimPO / GRPO), dataset construction. Design agent harnesses and tool-using LLM systems: tool calling, structured outputs, routing, retries, memory and context, guardrails.

Build the evaluation layer: offline and pairwise evals, LLM-as-a-judge, regression suites that actually correlate with A/B outcomes. Cut dialogue failure modes — loops, contradictions, persona drift, context loss, generic replies — and keep inference efficient on latency and cost per message.

Stay hands-on where it matters (roughly 10–20% of your time): prototypes, debugging agent traces, reviewing your team's work. We expect from you: Technical degree and a real ML engineering background — you have trained and shipped models yourself, not only managed people who do. Experience