Senior Machine Learning Engineering Manager

Meet the team behind this journey

You will lead the Production Inference team — the group responsible for the systems that serve DeepL's language AI models reliably and efficiently at scale. We sit at the intersection of research-grade technical ambition and production-grade operational discipline: our work determines whether DeepL's models reach users with the latency, reliability, and cost profile that makes commercial deployment viable. The team owns the full model serving stack — from GPU-resident inference runtimes and deployment infrastructure through to the developer platform that enables every other research team to bring their models to production. We operate within the Research organisation, with close ties to DeepL's infrastructure and platform functions, and our architectural decisions affect every product DeepL ships. The broader Research organisation publishes regularly at ACL, NeurIPS, and EMNLP, and the Production Inference team brings that same culture of rigour and innovation to the systems layer of AI.

Your responsibilities

As Engineering Manager for the Production Inference team, you will own both people leadership and technical direction for a team of research scientists and ML engineers working on performance-critical model serving systems. While this is not a hands-on coding role, you will be deeply involved in technical reviews, architecture decisions, and research direction for the inference stack.

You will:

• Lead and develop a high-performing team of research scientists and ML engineers, building strong development plans, fostering a candid and non-retaliatory feedback culture, and maintaining high standards of technical rigour and delivery.

• Own the team's research and development roadmap for production inference systems, in close collaboration with senior ICs and cross-functional stakeholders, balancing near-term reliability commitments with longer-horizon research bets on inference efficiency and architecture.

• Act as the primary technical interface between the Production Inference team and adjacent functions — including foundational models research, voice research, applied research, infrastructure, and product — ensuring research output is well-scoped, well-communicated, and delivered without creating downstream bottlenecks.

• Drive the reliability, efficiency, and cost performance of DeepL's model serving stack, including strategic decisions around serving infrastructure evolution (load balancing, autoscaling, runtime selection, and hardware utilisation).

• Operate with a high degree of autonomy, defining the team's direction and pushing for results in an environment where requirements from product or commercial stakeholders can be ambiguous or evolving.

• Play an active role in identifying, assessing, and recruiting research and engineering talent as the team continues to develop.

Qualities we look for

• You have proven experience leading a team of researchers or ML engineers, with a track record of developing talent, maintaining delivery rigour, and holding the balance between research quality and production reliability.

• You have a strong background Computer Science, Mathematics, Physics, or a comparable quantitative discipline, or possess a strong ML/systems background with equivalent research depth.

• You have a strong foundation in production ML systems, inference optimisation, or model serving at scale — direct experience with LLM inference, speculative decoding, quantisation, or serving infrastructure is a meaningful differentiator.

• You are comfortable operating across the full model lifecycle — from training handoff through to production deployment, monitoring, and efficiency improvement — and understand infrastructure and compute constraints without needing to own them directly.

• You have excellent communication skills and the ability to translate complex technical direction into clear goals for both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

• You are solution-oriented and decisive, able to define direction and drive outcomes without waiting for direction from above.

What we offer

• Diverse and internationally distributed team: joining our team means becoming part of a large, global community with people of more than 90 nationalities. We're more than just colleagues; we're a group of professionals with a shared mission to connect diverse cultures. Our global presence is growing–we've doubled in size nearly every year, with our employees based in the UK, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, the US, and Japan, and we continue to expand our network.

• Hybrid work, flexible hours: we offer a hybrid work schedule, with team members coming into the office twice a week. This allows you to engage directly with your team and experience the unique energy of our workspace, while still enjoying the flexibility and comfort of working from home. With flexible working hours and trust in your productivity, we are in sync with your team’s general locations and time zones to foster effective and seamless collaboration.

• Virtual Shares - An ownership mindset in every role. We believe everyone should share in our success, and that’s why every employee receives Virtual Shares, linking your contribution directly to DeepL’s growth and rewarding you with a stake in our future.

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