Senior Machine Learning Engineer (Bucharest)

Lateral stands for technology excellence.

We're a profitable, award-winning design and technology company with over 20 years of experience launching bold ventures and transforming businesses. A globally distributed team of 200+ experts united by a shared purpose: the continuous pursuit of quality.

What You'll Do

We're looking for someone genuinely exceptional: not broadly experienced, but specifically excellent in a way you can name and prove. This role is for the kind of ML engineer who has owned a system from first principles through production, who decides what to optimise before optimising it, and who makes the people around them sharper just by being in the room.

We leverage machine learning to deliver solutions in medical imaging and applied AI for longevity medicine, problems where the quality of the model has real clinical consequences and where the science is still being written. As a Senior Machine Learning Engineer, you will design and conduct systematic experiments, implement and validate model architectures in code, optimise model performance through rigorous training strategies, and review the literature to plan the best way forward. You will collaborate directly with domain experts and researchers at the top of their field to define problem statements, interpret outputs, and translate findings into production systems that hold.

The scientific direction on these engagements comes from some of the leading researchers in medical imaging globally. The engineering has to match that standard.

What We're Looking For

We're looking for someone who is genuinely exceptional at this work - not broadly experienced, but specifically excellent in a way you can name and prove.

You must bring:

• 5+ years of hands-on experience in machine learning, including model design, training, and evaluation.

• Extensive experience applying machine learning to real-world computer vision or medical imaging problems, including developing, deploying, and optimizing models.

• Proficiency with PyTorch or TensorFlow and comfort writing clean, modular experimentation code.

• Practical experience running experiments, tuning models, and comparing approaches via systematic validation.

• Excellent grasp of modern ML concepts: regularization, loss functions, optimization strategies, generalization, overfitting.

• An understanding of statistical testing and experimental design to assess performance, robustness, and reproducibility.

• Strong communication skills: able to collaborate with engineers, researchers, and domain experts to translate needs into solutions.

• A track record of generating novel ideas, exploring them rigorously, and translating them into working systems.

Bonus points for experience with medical imaging or scientific ML, published research or open-source ML contributions, or familiarity with explainability techniques and multimodal systems.

Why You'll Love Working Here

• Work that matters at the deepest level. The engagement this role sits inside is applied AI for longevity medicine - systems that help detect disease earlier and understand the human body more precisely. The science behind it comes from some of the leading minds in medical imaging research globally.

• Real Impact: You'll work on meaningful products that make a measurable difference.

• Remote-First, Office Friendly: Work from wherever you're most productive - whether that's your home, a co-working space, or one of our offices. We prioritize async collaboration, respect your time zone, and focus on outcomes over hours.

• An Outstanding Team: Talented, kind, and hard-working people who care deeply about their craft - and about each other. No egos. No politics. Just professionals doing their best work.

• Growth: You'll be supported in growing your craft, exploring new paths, and stepping into greater responsibility - at your own pace.

• A Culture of Excellence: We care deeply about doing the right thing - for our clients, our team, and ourselves. No burnout. No crunch. Just high-quality work, delivered sustainably.

• Variety & Stability: We're profitable, independent, and over two decades strong. Yet every project brings a fresh challenge. You'll never be bored here.

This Role Might Not Be for You

We want to respect your time by being clear about what this role isn't. You should skip this opportunity if:

• You prefer well defined structure. If you gravitate towards a clear hierarchy, well defined roles and swim lanes, you may find our self-managed style challenging.

• Distributed work isn't your thing. If you find async communication, design documentation and being proactive without a manager nearby difficult, our setup won't suit you.

• Feedback doesn't excite you. We're obsessed with quality and believe in continuous improvement. That means we give feedback that's sometimes nitpicky. If refining the work until it's excellent feels over the top, you are likely going to find working here frustrating.

• Change makes you uncomfortable. We're scaling and maturing. That means not everything is perfect yet. Priorities shift. Processes evolve. If ambiguity is uncomfortable, this may feel bumpy.

However, if this sounds like fuel - we'd love to talk!

How to Apply and What to Expect in the Interview Process

01. Your work. Show us the work that reflects you at your best. We'll look at depth, the quality of your thinking, and the logic behind your choices.

02. Lateral team fit. You'll speak with our Talent team about your career direction, your motivators, and our plans ahead.

03. Work trial. You'll tackle a take-home challenge that mirrors what we actually do.

04. Engineering deep dive. A collaborative session with our engineers.

05. Project fit. An interview focused on prioritisation, collaboration across disciplines, and how you handle the messy middle.