Senior Machine Learning Engineer

• Join Sona, the AI company building software for frontline businesses, in a full-time fully remote role across UK and European time zones. • Join a two-person ML team working on a forecasting system that makes half-hourly demand predictions for restaurant chains. • Scale a working forecasting system from a handful of clients to hundreds. • Own client launches end to end, from data validation and model selection through UAT, go-live and monitoring. • Join client calls and understand what matters on the ground, not just model accuracy. • Build systems that will still be foundational in three years. • Earn £95,000–£110,000 plus equity.

• Bring production ML experience deploying systems that handle messy data, fail gracefully and need monitoring. • Show strong ML fundamentals and reason about trade-offs in practice. • Explain the reasoning behind feature and model choices, and make good calls when something unexpected happens. • Bring client-facing deployment experience, having personally owned an ML deployment end to end. • Work comfortably on calls with non-technical stakeholders. • Write strong Python, including the ML and scientific stack such as NumPy and scikit-learn. • Use AI development tools such as Claude Code, Cursor or Copilot daily as your default working mode. • Choose simple solutions in front of users over complicated ones. • Work pragmatically and iteratively across parallel projects. • Be based in a European time zone.

• Bring experience in forecasting, time-series or demand planning, including lag features and calendar effects. • Understand evaluation integrity intuitively. • Bring experience with scikit-learn, MLflow, Docker and GCP. • Show experience working in a small team where ownership is wide and context-switching is normal.

• Own client launches end to end, from validating data to going live. • Select models and run user acceptance testing with clients. • Monitor forecasting performance after launch. • Scale the forecasting system from a handful of clients to hundreds. • Join client calls and build relationships with frontline operators. • Work with industry experts to understand the realities of clients’ businesses. • Take a machine learning project from business idea through to deployed production system.

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.

• Earn £95,000–£110,000 with share options. • Work fully remotely from a European time zone. • Take 35 days of annual leave, with an extra day for every year of service. • Get pension contributions matched up to 5%. • Receive comprehensive health insurance. • Benefit from enhanced parental leave and pay. • Use a salary sacrifice childcare scheme through a workplace nursery. • Get a co-working stipend if you are based outside London. • Join annual all-expenses-paid team retreats. • Receive a MacBook, home office budget, professional development budget and unlimited free books.

Sona builds AI for frontline businesses, tackling operational problems like shift-by-shift labour costs, regional compliance and thin margins that most software has never touched. Frontline sectors employ 80% of the global workforce but have received only about 1% of the last decade’s software investment. Sona has raised over $100M from N47, Felicis, Gradient and Northzone, signed more than 100 enterprise customers across the UK and US, and has offices in London, New York, Austin and Lisbon.