Senior Natural Language Processing Engineer - PT - US only

About the Company

Fog City Code Works is a boutique software design and development company based in the San Francisco Bay Area. We specialize in delivering software and cloud-based solutions for enterprise and business applications, working with innovative clients across industries. With a strong track record of successful projects, we pride ourselves on offering top-tier professional services, leveraging the latest technologies from Microsoft, AWS, and Azure.

About the Role

We are seeking an experienced Natural Language Processing (NLP) Engineer with expertise in text classification to join our team on a contract basis. This role involves developing and optimizing machine learning models for categorizing unstructured text data. The ideal candidate will have extensive experience working with open-source NLP models (such as those from Hugging Face) or cloud-based NLP services (such as Azure Cognitive Services).

This is a 100% remote, part-time contract position (1099), requiring 20 hours per week for a 6-month duration. Regular team meetings will be conducted via MS Teams.

Key Responsibilities

• Model Development: Design, develop, and optimize NLP models for text classification using Hugging Face models or Azure Custom Text Classification.

• Data Preprocessing: Clean, preprocess, and transform large, pre-labeled text datasets for training and model improvement.

• Machine Learning Training & Optimization: Work through the full ML lifecycle, including data collection, model training, fine-tuning, and deployment.

• Research & Innovation: Stay updated on advancements in NLP and ML to improve model performance and efficiency.

• Collaboration & Implementation: Work closely with engineers to enhance system performance and explore emerging AI techniques.

• Performance Monitoring: Develop testing and monitoring protocols to ensure the reliability, accuracy, and scalability of AI-driven solutions.

Required Skills & Qualifications

• 8-10 years of experience in NLP system development.
• 5-8 years of experience with cloud-based AI services such as Hugging Face, AWS, or Azure.
• Strong experience in text classification using modern NLP techniques.
• Expertise in training, fine-tuning, and optimizing ML models for unstructured text processing.
• Proficiency in Python and ML libraries such as TensorFlow, PyTorch, or Scikit-learn.
• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Data Science, or a related field.

Nice-to-Have Skills

• Experience with deploying ML models in production environments.
• Familiarity with MLOps frameworks for managing ML workflows.
• Strong understanding of natural language understanding (NLU) beyond classification tasks.