Senior ML/AI Engineer (Colombia)

As our lead Senior AI Engineer, you'll take full ownership of the AI and ML capabilities that make our product truly intelligent and hyper-personalized. You'll design, build, and deploy the core AI systems from the ground up, spanning on-device inference for responsive mobile experiences and cloud-based models for deeper personalization and real-time insights. Working closely with product, design, mobile (iOS/Android), and backend teammates, you'll translate high-level travel vision into production-grade AI features like intelligent recommendations, context-aware suggestions, adaptive itineraries, and anticipatory travel assistance. Expect to balance rapid prototyping with scalable, reliable, and efficient AI systems that respect privacy, battery life, and real-world travel variability.This is ideal if you enjoy greenfield AI projects, making foundational modeling and integration decisions in ambiguity, and shipping consumer-facing AI where model quality, latency, and user experience directly define the product.

Key Responsibilities
- Lead the architecture, development, training, optimization, and deployment of AI/ML models and pipelines from prototype to production scale.
- Develop cloud-based AI services (leveraging LLMs and multimodal models via APIs like Gemini, OpenAI, or equivalents) for advanced personalization, recommendation engines, natural language understanding of travel queries, and feedback loops.
- Establish and enforce best practices: clean ML code, experiment tracking, MLOps (model versioning, monitoring, A/B testing, drift detection), automated evaluation pipelines, cost-efficient inference, and ethical AI considerations (bias mitigation, privacy).
- Collaborate on feature definition, data requirements, success metrics, and iteration.

- Handle unique challenges in an AI-powered travel app: multimodal data (location, text, images), sparse/seasonal travel datasets, real-time adaptability, offline/online hybrid inference, and seamless integration with mobile clients and backend APIs.
- Mentor future team members as we expand the AI engineering group and help shape our AI culture from the start.

Required Qualifications
- Professional AI/ML engineering experience building and shipping production AI systems for consumer mobile or web apps (personalization, recommendation, or travel-related experience is a plus).
- Deep hands-on experience with on-device ML: Core ML, TensorFlow Lite / LiteRT, ML Kit GenAI APIs, Gemini Nano integration, model optimization (quantization, pruning), and hybrid on-device/cloud architectures.
- Practical experience with cloud AI/LLMs: fine-tuning, prompt engineering, RAG, tool calling, API orchestration, and building feedback/improvement loops for personalization.
- Proven success owning 0-to-1 AI projects or leading major ML initiatives and
comfortable making foundational decisions on model choice, data strategy, and deployment independently.
- Strong product sense: focus on user-centric metrics (engagement, conversion, satisfaction), low-latency inference, privacy-by-design, and robust evaluation in real-world scenarios.
- Excellent collaboration and communication skills and able to discuss AI trade-offs (accuracy vs. speed vs. cost) clearly with non-technical partners and engineers.

Preferred Qualifications
- Experience with travel/mobility domains (geospatial ML, recommendation systems for itineraries/routes, multimodal travel data, real-time context).
- Familiarity with MLOps tools (MLflow, Weights & Biases, Kubeflow equivalents), vector databases, or agentic workflows.
- Exposure to cross-platform AI consistency (iOS/Android alignment) or generative features in consumer apps.
- Open-source contributions, personal AI projects, or a portfolio demonstrating shipped ML models/systems (especially on-device or personalization-focused).