Senior Applied AI/ML Scientist

About the Role

This position is for a Senior Applied AI/ML Scientist to work remotely within Ireland for NewsWhip by Sprout Social's AI, Data, and Intelligence Business Unit. The team focuses on real-time analysis of global news streams, transforming millions of articles and data points daily into actionable intelligence trusted by journalists, PR professionals, and brands worldwide. The role centers on creating advanced LLM-powered systems that go beyond basic question-answering, encompassing reasoning, retrieval, enrichment, and interactive workflows to meet the demands of fast-changing news content.

Key Responsibilities

• Design and implement production-ready agentic workflows that operate both continuously in the background and interactively for real-time user queries.
• Lead development of content enrichment processes driven by LLMs that convert raw news data into structured, actionable insights incorporated into reports, alerts, and briefings.
• Steer technical strategy for tool-augmented LLM architectures including compatibility with Model Context Protocol, function calls, and multi-step reasoning pipelines.
• Evaluate and decide on the optimal use of methods such as retrieval, fine-tuning, agents, smaller models, or classical NLP for different tasks.
• Establish and promote structured prompting guidelines, output schemas, and reusable engineering patterns for LLM feature development.
• Define and enact comprehensive evaluation and monitoring frameworks for LLM systems, involving offline tests, live experimentation, regression checks, and human review workflows.
• Implement guardrails to minimize hallucinations, ensure factual accuracy, and maintain consistent output quality critical to the news and media domain.
• Integrate observability into all LLM features via tracing, cost and latency monitoring, quality metrics, and drift detection, balancing trade-offs between performance, latency, and cost.
• Advance embedding and semantic search infrastructure, improving chunking, hybrid search and re-ranking mechanics as part of a wider agentic system.
• Collaborate closely with Product and UX teams to translate abstract AI concepts into practical features that users trust and rely upon.
• Lead technical discussions, contribute to AI architecture decisions, mentor engineers, and stay informed on emerging models and technologies to enrich the engineering stack.

Requirements

• At least 6 years of experience developing and maintaining production software systems.
• Minimum 2 years of direct involvement in shipping LLM-powered functionalities in operational environments.
• Strong backend programming skills, with Python preferred.
• Proficiency with large language model APIs (e.g., OpenAI, Anthropic), transformer-based methods, embedding techniques, similarity search, vector databases (ChromaDB, Pinecone, Weaviate), prompt engineering, structured output, LLM evaluation frameworks, and MLOps practices including monitoring and versioning.
• Proven ability to take full ownership of systems from inception to deployment and operation.
• Experience in making and justifying architectural choices balancing model selection, build vs. buy decisions, latency, and quality.
• Mentorship or leadership experience in guiding engineers or conducting code/design reviews.
• Experience collaborating with Product and UX teams for feature production.

Preferred Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Data Science, Computer Science, Machine Learning, AI, or related field.
• Experience with AI orchestration frameworks like LangChain, LlamaIndex, or LangGraph.
• Knowledge of Model Context Protocol (MCP) or tool-calling architectures.
• Hands-on experience building tool-using or agentic workflows.
• Understanding of semantic search and content retrieval mechanisms.
• Familiarity with cloud platforms.
• Background in media analytics, content intelligence, or large-scale text data processing.
• Experience working in startup or fast-growth company environments.

Growth Plan

• First Month: Complete onboarding to understand product, data, and AI roadmaps; start contributing measurable feature improvements.
• By 3 Months: Take ownership of a major LLM feature or subsystem; lead technical discussions and refine evaluation approaches.
• By 6 Months: Deliver end-to-end AI features; establish reusable engineering patterns; improve quality metrics such as hallucination rates and latency.
• By 12 Months: Become a recognized expert, mentor peers, influence AI architecture roadmap, and propose innovative AI solutions.

Additional Information

This role embraces diversity and inclusion, welcoming applications from BIPOC, women, underrepresented genders, LGBTQIA+, parents, veterans, persons with disabilities, and people of all faiths.

Compensation and Benefits

• Salary range: €100,000 – €135,000 annually, with offers tailored by location, experience, and skills.
• Full private health and dental coverage for employees and dependents.
• Generous pension scheme with 1:1 match up to 6% of salary.
• Life and disability insurance fully covered by the employer.
• 25 days paid leave plus public holidays and company-wide rest days.
• Paid parental leave: 26 weeks for birthing parents, 16 weeks for non-birthing parents at full pay.
• Access to subsidized child and elder care services.
• Comprehensive mental health support including coaching and therapy.
• Lifestyle Spending Account with annual allowance to support well-being.
• Remote working support stipends for home office setup and monthly internet costs.
• Commuter benefits and charitable donation matching programs.

This company values transparency around compensation and emphasizes career growth potential. The position supports flexible locations within Ireland, with preference for Dublin or remote work within the country. Hiring outside EMEA is currently unavailable.

Company Overview

Sprout Social is an established leader in social media management and analytics technology, with its NewsWhip product delivering predictive business intelligence to global clients. Headquartered in Chicago and with offices globally, Sprout promotes a collaborative culture focused on innovation, customer success, and inclusivity.