Senior ML Engineer (Portugal Based Remote/Hybrid)

<span>Sword Health is on a mission to free two billion people from pain. </span><br/><span>With 67% of members achieving a pain-free life and a 70% reduction in surgery intent, at Sword, we are using AI Care to change lives, and save millions for our 25,000+ enterprise clients across three continents. Today, we hold the majority of industry patents, win 70% of competitive evaluations, and have raised more than $300 million from top venture firms like Founders Fund, Sapphire Ventures, General Catalyst, and Khosla Ventures.</span><br/><span>Recognized as a </span><a href="https://www.forbes.com/companies/sword-health/?list=americas-best-startup-employers&amp;sh=3f6063de752e">Forbes Best Startup Employer in 2025</a><span>, this award highlights our focus on being a destination for the best and brightest  talent. Not only have we experienced unprecedented growth since our market debut in 2020,  but we’ve also created a remarkable mission and value-driven environment that is loved by our growing team. With a recent valuation of $4 billion, we are in a phase of hyper growth and expansion, and we’re looking for individuals with passion, commitment, and energy to help us scale our global impact. </span><br/><span>Joining Sword means committing to a set of core values, chief amongst them to “do it for the patients” every day, and to always “deliver more than expected” on behalf of our members and clients.</span><br/><span>This is an opportunity for you to make a significant difference on a massive scale as you work alongside 1000+ (and growing!) talented colleagues, spanning three continents. Your charge? To help us build a pain-free world, powered by AI, enhanced by people — accessible to all.</span><br/><br/><b>The AI Team</b><br/>The main goal of the AI team is to leverage AI and ML to provide high-quality clinical care at unprecedented levels of personalization and scale. In this regard, in close collaboration with the clinical team, we develop ML-powered features that identify the best course of action for each patient at any given moment or circumstance whilst employing a holistic perspective but also contemplating any relevant nuance. We also work on ensuring the overall experience is as close as possible to a 1:1 session with a Physical Therapist and thus play a crucial role in enabling the AI Care provided by Sword.<br/>Examples of this are projects like “Phoenix” and all the decision support systems that empower our Physical Therapists to provide world-class care to our members<br/>As for the near future, our focus will be on taking the degree of personalization and human touch of our AI care to a whole new level by leveraging the most recent developments in the Generative AI field. <h3>What you'll be doing:</h3> <ul> <li>Contribute to designing, building, evaluating, shipping, and improving Sword’s products by hands-on AI/ML development;</li><li>Develop and maintain data processing pipelines for getting the data required to build and evaluate models;</li><li>Work alongside the Product, Data &amp; Engineering Teams to define and implement AI/ML-powered features for internal and external users;</li><li>Share your knowledge and experience of how to build ML systems;</li><li>Help grow the AI/ML function by defining and promoting best practices;</li><li>Identify and spearhead initiatives for adding AI/ML capabilities to Sword’s products by navigating uncertainty and time-to-value tradeoffs.</li></ul> <h3>What you need to have:</h3> <ul> <li>4+ years of professional experience in Machine Learning;</li><li>Hands-on experience implementing and maintaining production machine learning systems;</li><li>Solid experience in SQL and Python as well as experience developing production software;</li><li>Working knowledge of Python data stack (numpy, pandas, matplotlib, scikit-learn, etc);</li><li>Experience leading and owning complex and ambiguous projects from ideation to completion/maintenance;</li><li>Experience providing technical oversight and mentoring colleagues;</li><li>Ability to learn quickly and dive deep into new problems and fields;</li><li>Ability to communicate concepts clearly and interface with both technical and non-technical stakeholders;</li><li>Ability to prioritize and solve issues according to the team’s direction and goals.</li></ul> <h3>What we would love to see:</h3> <ul> <li>Experience working in a fast-paced environment and wearing different hats;</li><li>Experience building data processing pipelines;</li><li>Experience shipping applications using LLMs and Generative AI;</li><li>Experience using cloud platforms like GCP or AWS.</li></ul> <h3>To ensure you feel good solving a big Human problem, we offer:</h3> <ul> <li>A stimulating, fast-paced environment with lots of room for creativity; </li><li>A bright future at a promising high-tech startup company; </li><li>Career development and growth, with a competitive salary; </li><li>The opportunity to work with a talented team and to add real value