Sr Applied Machine Learning Scientist

Work Location Type: Hybrid
As a leading industrial distributor with operations primarily in North America, Japan and the United Kingdom, We Keep The World Working® by serving more than 4.5 million customers worldwide with products delivered through innovative technology and deep customer relationships. With 2023 sales of $16.5 billion, we're dedicated to providing value for customers, fostering an engaging culture for team members and driving strong financial results.
Our welcoming workplace enables you to learn, grow and make a difference by keeping businesses running and their people safe. As a 2024 Glassdoor Best Place to Work and a Great Place to Work-Certified™ company, we're looking for passionate people to join our team as we continue leading the industry over our next 100 years.
Position Details:
You will work with a team of world-class scientists and technologists to develop modern capabilities to further Grainger's technological leadership in the MRO industry.
You will be a part of the team to build advanced technologies and solutions to solve a wide spectrum of business and customer challenges. Grainger's business-centric innovation methodology will empower the team to experiment with new technology, such as Computer Vision, Deep Learning, Conversational AI, 3D Imaging and LiDAR, Augmented/Virtual Reality, AI Robotics and IoT, and multimodal Machine Learning. You will work with other production teams within Grainger's Technology Group (GTG) to harvest innovations into product roadmaps and scale them for production.
We are looking for a Senior Applied Machine learning Scientist with experience in AI/ML technologies, specifically in the area of Large Language Models (LLMs). You will manage the development of Machine Learning algorithms and models particularly in NLP and Multi-modal context. You will work with teams to identify problems and create high-quality solutions. You will report into the Manager, Applied Machine Learning. This is a hybrid role based out of our Lake Forest office.
You Will:

• Study MRO challenges with product partners, propose solutions, prototype and present learnings and results.
• Design, propose, evaluate algorithms, techniques and architectures.
• Evaluate, adapt, fine-tune LLMs, multimodal architectures and computer vision models.
• Develop production ready code, test, deploy with the help of engineering and MLOps partners.
• Stay up to date with the latest developments in AI/ML technologies by researching new methodologies and integrating them into existing systems.

You Have:

• Master's or PhD degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or a related field
• At least 5 years of experience in machine learning, with a focus on NLP and Computer Vision
• Proficiency in programming languages such as Python and C++
• Experience with deep learning frameworks such as TensorFlow or PyTorch
• Familiarity with large-scale data processing and cloud computing platforms
• Excellent problem-solving skills and ability to work collaboratively in a team environment
• Familiarity with deployment pipelines, model delivery and monitoring in production environments
• Familiarity with transformer architectures, fine-tuning LLMs and techniques specific to NLP (tokenization, Named Entity Recognition, text analysis)
• Understanding how to combine text with other modalities to enhance model capabilities for industrial applications
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills as evidenced by internal, academic, or industry publications and presentations in their domain of expertise

We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender, gender identity or expression, or veteran status. We are proud to be an equal opportunity workplace.
We are committed to fostering an inclusive, accessible environment that includes both providing reasonable accommodations to individuals with disabilities during the application and hiring process as well as throughout the course of one's employment. With this in mind, should you need a reasonable accommodation during the application and selection process, please advise us so that we can provide appropriate assistance.