Happy Dots

Senior Machine Learning Engineer

Position Title: Senior Machine Learning Engineer 

Reports To: Project Management Team

Direct Reports: None

Location: Porto, Portugal

Job Description

We are looking for a Senior Machine Learning Engineer to join our Data Science team. This is a senior role for an experienced professional with a proven record of building, deploying, and maintaining scalable ML systems in production environments. You will lead the ML infrastructure end-to-end — from model training and deployment to automation and monitoring — ensuring reliability, efficiency, and business impact. Your work will enable data-driven decisions at scale, guiding our teams toward smarter, faster, and more measurable outcomes.

Responsibilities

• Apply your engineering skills and in-depth knowledge to run applied statistics, ML infrastructure, model deployment, and production system design, with a focus on delivering inference from structured, tabular data.
• Building scalable ML pipeline automation, establishing MLOps best practices, and mentoring the development team on ML system architecture.
• Be an excellent communicator, capable of presenting outcomes and caveats of technical solutions to non-technical teams. 
• Mentor engineers and establish technical best practices from scratch
• Share knowledge to expand the overall ML engineering capabilities of our organization.
• Maintain clear and comprehensive documentation of the work done, and keep all the critical information organized and easy to digest for both data and project team members
• Demonstrate commitment to staying current with the latest MLOps tools, infrastructure patterns, and production ML best practices.
  
   

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's in Computer Science, Data Science, or related field.
• Minimum of 5 years of related experience with a Bachelor's degree, or 3 years with a Master's degree.
• Experience working with large-scale, structured datasets.
• Proven experience leading technical initiatives and defining ML infrastructure standards.
• Extensive experience with ML infrastructure projects involving model serving, ML pipeline automation, monitoring, and MLOps tooling.
• Excellent understanding of software engineering principles, system design, and ML model optimization for production environments.
• High proficiency with Python programming language and software engineering best practices
• High proficiency with Python libraries used to implement applied statistics (numpy, pandas, matplotlib, statsmodels, scikit-learn)
• High proficiency with SQL and experience with cloud-based data warehouses (BigQuery preferred) and data pipeline technologies (dbt preferred)
• Strong understanding of cloud infrastructure, containerization (Docker/Kubernetes), and distributed systems
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills with the ability to educate and influence technical teams
• Fluent English (spoken and written).
  
   

Nice to Have

• Experience working in the online advertising industry
• Knowledge of the film industry and its unique marketing and audience challenges
• Experience with Ruby on Rails full-stack development  

About Gruvi 

Gruvi is a data-driven media and insights agency dedicated to the film industry. We combine creativity, data, and proprietary technology to deliver impactful campaigns for film distributors and exhibitors worldwide. With an international presence and a team of media and advertising experts, we combine advertising campaigns, proprietary data to push the boundaries of digital media to help our clients drive meaningful results. We are passionate about film and committed to using cutting-edge insights to ensure great films find their audience.

This freelance role focuses on hands-on development of gameplay features and underlying technical architecture for a strategy-focused project. You will translate game design requirements into robust, maintainable systems, contribute to overall project structure, and help ensure the game performs reliably across supported platforms. The role requires strong ownership, technical judgment, and the ability to collaborate effectively within a multidisciplinary team.

Required experience

• Extensive professional experience with C# and Unity in game development.
• Strong background in gameplay programming and system-driven game architecture.
• Experience developing strategy, simulation, or midcore gameplay systems.
• Proven ability to build features that are scalable, readable, and production-ready.

• Experience shipping or supporting games on multiple platforms.

   

Preferred experience

• Prior experience working on cross-platform Unity projects.
• Familiarity with collaborative workflows in multidisciplinary game teams.
• Experience with live iteration, prototyping, and evolving design requirements.
• Interest in narrative-driven or politically themed strategy games.\

Job Responsibilities

• Design, implement, and maintain core gameplay features and systems for a midcore strategy game.
• Develop scalable and well-structured gameplay architecture that supports complex mechanics and future expansion.
• Implement strategy and simulation systems, including turn-based or state-driven logic, progression, and player-facing mechanics.
• Collaborate closely with Game Design to interpret specifications and refine mechanics into practical, performant solutions.
• Work with Art and UI teams to integrate visual and interface elements smoothly into gameplay systems.
• Coordinate with other programmers and technical stakeholders to align on coding standards, architecture, and best practices.
• Ensure stable cross-platform functionality, including platform-specific considerations for performance, input, and builds.
• Debug, optimize, and refactor existing systems to improve performance, stability, and maintainability.
• Support iterative development through regular reviews, feedback cycles, and milestone-driven delivery.