Machine Learning and Generative AI Engineer, Digital Transformation

Company Description

By working at Harvard University, you join a vibrant community that advances Harvard's world-changing mission in meaningful ways, inspires innovation and collaboration, and builds skills and expertise. We are dedicated to creating a diverse and welcoming environment where everyone can thrive.

Why join Harvard Business School?

Harvard Business School (HBS), located on a 40-acre campus in Boston, was founded in 1908 as part of Harvard University. It is among the world's most trusted sources of management education and thought leadership. For more than a century, the School's faculty has combined a passion for teaching with rigorous research conducted alongside practitioners at world-leading organizations to educate leaders who make a difference in the world. Through a dynamic ecosystem of research, learning, and entrepreneurship that includes MBA, Doctoral, Executive Education, and Online programs, as well as numerous initiatives, centers, institutes, and labs, Harvard Business School fosters bold new ideas and collaborative learning networks that shape the future of business.

Job Description

Be a pioneer in business, education, and global impact by joining the Harvard Business School Digital Transformation team - a “startup with assets,” where you will have the chance to deploy cutting-edge digital and emerging-technology education solutions. Where else can you make a difference at the intersection of cutting-edge technology, world-class education, noble purpose, and timeless legacy?

As a Machine Learning and Generative AI Engineer on our team, you will help lead the development of innovative generative AI products that address the needs of our constituents (students, alumni, faculty, researchers, staff, and the community at large). This key technical leadership role requires hands-on expertise across the full machine learning and AI lifecycle. You will collaborate with data scientists, product managers, and data engineers to operationalize AI models in production, drive core platform capabilities, and apply these in a variety of domains. You will also develop and deploy novel approaches to optimize existing AI systems and maximize their business value.

You will play a central role in building and scaling our core application platform — the hub within HBS where application developers can share data and code. As custodians of this platform, we will apply best practices and leverage existing repositories to accelerate the path from prototype for GenAI applications and unlock economies of scale. You will be highly influential in advancing our GenAI capabilities, guiding the teams towards impactful and ethical AI. We seek an expert eager to grow and disseminate GenAI expertise across the organization.
 

Duties and Responsibilities:

• Architect, build, maintain, and improve a suite of GenAI applications and their underlying systems.
• Automate machine learning pipelines, monitor performance and costs, and optimize models by using techniques such as LoRA/QLoRA and other parameter-efficient methods.
• Establish reusable frameworks to streamline model building, deployment and monitoring. Incorporate comprehensive logging, tracing, and alerting mechanisms.
• Build guardrails, compliance rules, and oversight workflows into the GenAI application platform, including approval chains for model updates and staged rollouts for production releases.
• Develop templates, guides, and sandbox environments to support onboarding of new contributors and experimentation with emerging techniques
• Ensure user-facing applications built on the GenAI application platform are safe and reliable, enforcing rigorous validation and testing before publishing, and implement a clear peer review process.
• Apply an entrepreneurial mindset to identify opportunities to optimize business processes, improve user experiences, and prototype solutions that demonstrate value.
• Work closely with data scientists and analysts to develop and deploy new product features across web and mobile applications.
• Contribute to and promote sound software engineering practices across the team.
• Mentor and educate team members to adopt best practices in writing and maintaining production-grade machine learning code.
• Actively contribute to and leverage community best practices and open-source resources.
• Monitor, debug, and resolve production issues in a timely manner. 
• Partner with project managers to ensure projects are delivered on time and within budget.
• Collaborate with Technical Product Managers to track algorithmic performance KPIs and prioritize performance improvements based on effort and impact.
• Build trust and collaboration by being present on-site and engaging directly with colleagues and various constituents.