Job Title: Azure AI Engineer Location: Fully Remote Job Type: 6 Month Contract + chance for extension Interview Process: Video Interviews held remotely Rate: DOE Outside IR35 A software development company are seeking an NLP Engineer to join the team on a 6-month contract basis. I wondered if this would be of interest to you or anyone in your network The role requires expertise in deep learning and LLMs – ideally in Azure environments. Key Responsibilities: • Develop, train and fine-tune state-of-the-art text classification and text generation models for various NLP tasks including sentiment analysis, bot detection, misinformation detection, fact-checking, and topic discovery. • Utilise advanced NLP techniques such as few-shot learning, knowledge distillation, model distillation, and adapter-based fine-tuning to enhance model efficiency and performance. • Adapt and customise pre-trained models to specific domains and languages through further pretraining, multilingual distillation, and related techniques. • Generate and curate domain-specific synthetic datasets to augment training data, with a focus on Arabic language and its dialects considered a strong advantage. • Implement traditional machine learning methods for clustering (including incremental/online clustering) of embeddings, dimensionality reduction, and other relevant unsupervised learning techniques. • Work extensively with NLP and deep learning frameworks including Transformers and associated HuggingFace libraries (datasets, trl, peft), PyTorch, Sentence Transformers, SpaCy, and Scikit-learn. • Write clean, scalable, and maintainable Python code for batch data analytics pipelines and for building inference services exposed via APIs. • Design and execute comprehensive model evaluation protocols to validate model accuracy, robustness, and real-world applicability. • Collaborate with engineering teams to deploy models using containerisation and serving tools such as Docker, Kubernetes, Triton Inference Server, VLLM, and FastAPI. • Optionally utilise cloud infrastructure, preferably Azure, to manage training workloads and model deployment. • Utilise social media analytics tools and techniques, ideally with experience handling data in both English and Arabic. • Communicate technical concepts effectively in fluent English; proficiency in Arabic is a plus. Qualifications and Skills: • Experience in NLP techniques such as distillation, few-shot text classification, knowledge distillation, and adapters. • Familiarity with deployment and containerization technologies—such as Triton, VLLM, Docker, Kubernetes, and FastAPI is a plus. • Write scalable Python code, including pipeline logic for batch analytics and partly for inference to be served as APIs • Designing model evaluation scenarios • Experience with Azure is a plus • Fluent English (Arabic is a plus) If you think this could be an exciting opportunity for you then please apply now!