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Staff Machine Learning Engineer

Thorn· Engineering
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Remote$171k - $235.8kfull-timePosted 1mo ago

About the role

Remote, US-based staff ML engineer role at Thorn, a nonprofit focusing on eliminating child sexual exploitation material online. Responsible for designing, deploying, and maintaining ML models and systems to support Thorn’s mission, collaborating across legal, engineering, product, and external partners while mentoring other engineers.

Responsibilities

  • Own end-to-end model development: design, build, test and maintain machine learning systems and algorithms
  • Lead machine learning system designs, set engineering standards, lead technical meetings and mentor other engineers
  • Help debug, do code review, and support ML initiatives led by other team members
  • Define data sourcing and labeling strategy for your domain, identify future data needs and drive planning with Sr. Technical Program Manager
  • Work with Thorn specialists to create data labeling guides and support labeling efforts
  • Identify cross-team dependencies, anticipate technical risks, and establish architectural guardrails for scalability and reliability
  • Represent Thorn as a technical thought leader at conferences and external forums
  • Collaborate with engineers, product managers, product owners, and designers to translate user needs into features
  • Collaborate on model serving infrastructure and deployment with product teams
  • Improve the innovation-to-impact cycle through collaboration with external partnerships
  • Build relationships with external partners
  • Improve systems, author tools, and establish policies to raise productivity for the ML team
  • Clearly communicate problem formulation, feature/model design, training, and evaluation results to technical and non-technical audiences
  • Identify new problem spaces in online child safety and stay updated on technical advancements
  • Drive roadmap planning and cadence for maintenance vs. new features in areas of ownership
  • Conduct data analysis to improve cross-functional understanding
  • Collaborate with Product and Engineering during planning, design, development, and time-sensitive support efforts

Qualifications

  • 8+ years background in machine learning and/or AI, with 3+ years building production-scale computer vision and/or NLP systems and pipelines
  • Ph.D or master's in a quantitative field, or equivalent professional experience
  • Commitment to child safety and ability to learn about online child safety and victim identification
  • Ability to work with ambiguity, shifting requirements, and collaborate with cross-functional stakeholders
  • Strong communication skills, empathy, and collaborative, service-oriented mindset
  • Willingness to learn new technologies quickly and translate opportunities into scalable solutions
  • Experience translating unique opportunities into cross-functional alignment and actionable roadmaps

Skills

Required:Machine Learning / AIComputer VisionCommunication
Nice to have:Natural Language ProcessingData Labeling & Annotation
Last updated Sep 9, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.

About Thorn

Will you help protect childhood joy?

We builds tools to defend children from grooming, sextortion and more. We're on a mission to eliminate child sexual abuse materials (CSAM) from the internet.

child safetychild sexual abuseCSAMonline groomingsextortionAI-Generated CSAMchild protection
Company profileWebsite

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