Senior Machine Learning Engineer

• Join a two-person ML team working on a forecasting system making half-hourly demand predictions across diverse targets for multiple restaurant chains. • Own client launches end-to-end from validating data, selecting models, running UAT, going live, and monitoring performance afterwards. • Scale the forecasting system from a handful of clients to hundreds while navigating feedback loops and a highly variable environment.

• Have production ML experience with a track record of deploying ML systems that handle messy data, fail gracefully, and need monitoring. • Have strong ML fundamentals, able to reason about tradeoffs in practice, explain the why behind feature and model choices, and make good judgement calls when something unexpected happens. • Have client-facing deployment experience, having personally owned an ML deployment end-to-end and being comfortable on calls with non-technical stakeholders. • Have strong programming skills in Python including the ML/scientific Python stack such as numpy and scikit-learn. • Use AI development tools such as Claude Code, Cursor, or Copilot daily as your default working mode.

• Have experience with forecasting, time-series, or demand-planning, understanding lag features, calendar effects, and evaluation integrity intuitively. • Have experience with the stack: Python, scikit-learn, MLflow, Docker, and GCP. • Have experience working in a small team where ownership is wide and context-switching is normal.

• Own client launches end-to-end including validating data, selecting models, running UAT, going live, and monitoring performance afterwards. • Join client calls, build relationships, and understand what actually matters on the ground beyond model accuracy. • Scale the forecasting system from a handful of clients to hundreds. • Work with industry experts to understand what is happening in clients' businesses and the realities of working there. • Take machine learning projects from business idea to deployed production system. • See beyond the data to the world that resulted in the data generating process, the issues that come with it, and the opportunity it gives.

Sona is one of the most exciting B2B SaaS companies in the UK right now. The company has raised over $100 million from world-class investors and has grown revenue by 400% in 2023 alone. Two of the three founders, Oli Johnson and Ben Dixon, previously spent six years building Catapult, a gig platform for hospitality and retail, while Steffen Wulff Petersen came from Rocket Internet, where he helped launch Lazada, HelloFresh and Payleven. That domain expertise is a genuine differentiator: Sona is not a generic scheduling tool bolted onto HR. It is built from the ground up for complex, multi-site enterprises with hundreds or thousands of frontline staff. What stands out on Glassdoor (4.6/5 from 26 reviews, 88% recommend, 94% positive business outlook) is how consistently employees praise the team culture, the benefits and the pace of growth. The compensation sub-score is a remarkable 4.9/5. Sona offers genuinely strong benefits for a startup: Bupa health insurance, 25 days holiday plus 10 flexible public holidays (with an extra day per year of service), enhanced parental leave (26 weeks full pay for primary parents, 8 weeks for secondary), share options, pension matching up to 5%, twice-yearly team retreats and a quarterly £200 learning budget. The main things to be aware of: this is a fast-paced startup where priorities shift quickly; some reviews mention long hours and pressure around headcount management; and the team is still relatively small, at around 150 people. But with a fresh $45 million Series B led by N47, US expansion underway, and the recent launch of Forge, an enterprise AI application builder that lets customers create custom software on top of Sona's platform, the company is at a genuinely exciting inflexion point.

• Work fully remotely from European time zones. • Receive share options. • Receive 35 days annual leave including 25 days standard plus 10 flexible public holiday days. • Receive an extra day of leave for every year of service. • Receive pension contributions matched up to 5%. • Receive comprehensive health insurance. • Receive enhanced parental leave and pay. • Access salary sacrifice childcare scheme through Workplace Nursery. • Receive a co-working space stipend for those based outside London. • Attend bi-annual all-expenses-paid team retreats. • Receive the latest MacBook and equipment budget for your home office. • Receive a professional development budget and unlimited free books.

Sona is the next generation of AI-native, frontline workforce management. The company has built an end-to-end platform covering Scheduling, HR, Payroll, and Communications that gives the largest frontline organisations everything they need to staff more intelligently and empower their teams. In under 5 years, Sona has made a deep impact on over 100k frontline workers, grown the team to 140+, and secured over $100M in funding from notable VCs including N47, Felicis, Northzone, and Gradient Ventures.