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# Machine Learning Engineer - Applied AI

- **Company:** Media Distillery B.V.
- **Location:** Amsterdam, Netherlands (Remote available)
- **Experience:** Expert
- **Salary:** €6,000.0 - €6,667.0
- **Contract:** Permanent contract
- **Skills:** Java (Programming Language), Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), Artificial Intelligence, Amazon Web Services, Encodings, Continuous Integration, Python (Programming Language), Machine Learning, Azure Machine Learning, Pytorch, Large Language Models, Model Validation, Backend, Machine Learning Operations, Data Pipelines, Docker
- **Published:** October 19, 2026
- **Apply:** https://mediadistillery.com/jobs/senior-machine-learning-engineer-applied-ai

## About the Role

* At least 5 years of experience in applied AI and machine learning, including generative AI (max 4 years, we know ;) )
 * A good understanding of traditional ML, such as encodings, embeddings, and classification models
 * Strong Python skills and experience with PyTorch or similar frameworks
 * Experience applying LLMs or VLMs in real-world products, from prompting and evaluation to fine-tuning and distillation
 * Solid backend skills: you can build and ship a service or API yourself using agentic coding tools
 * A solution-oriented mindset and a track record in production: you build the most pragmatic solution with the models available, and you maintain what customers use after launch
 * Strong problem-solving skills, comfort with messy real-world data, and rigorous model evaluation
 * Curious and proactive: you like to understand how new models and tools work, try them on real problems, and find ways to make challenging things possible
 * Proficient in English, written and spoken

Nice to have

 * Java experience for backend work, which is a big plus: our core services are written in Java, while many of our ML services are in Python
 * Experience with video, audio, and multimodal models, including formats and processing
 * Experience deploying models in production at large scale: AWS (including Amazon SageMaker), Docker and Kubernetes, CI/CD for machine learning, and GPU inference
 * Affinity with media, sports, and technology

## Description

You will work at the intersection of state-of-the-art AI and product. The core of the role is building AI-powered products that solve real needs of our customers, using the latest AI tools and models such as LLMs and VLMs. You care as much about why a feature matters to the customer as about how it works. When off-the-shelf models are not good enough, you train, fine-tune, or distill your own, so they are accurate, fast, and affordable on live video.

You have full ownership from the first experiment to production. The role is closer to a generalist than a specialist, and more applied than research: when a product needs a backend service, an API, or a data pipeline, you build it, using agentic coding tools to move fast.

What you'll do

 * Work with product, engineering, and sometimes sales or customers to understand customer needs and build AI-powered products with your team
 * Own features or initiatives end to end, from shaping the approach to delivering the result
 * Design and run experiments, evaluations, and benchmarks that show whether a model is good enough to ship
 * Train, fine-tune, and distill LLMs and VLMs for video understanding when off-the-shelf models are not enough
 * Manage the full model lifecycle, from prototype to production, with attention to latency, cost, and reliability
 * Contribute to a strong team through code and design reviews, knowledge sharing, and mentoring, and help shape our ML approach