Founding AI / ML Engineer

About the role

A Founding AI/ML Engineer at Kalima would build the intelligence layer that powers Kalima. You'll design and ship the models, pipelines, and infrastructure that turn messy manufacturing data into real-time decisions: from parsing RFQs to matching suppliers to optimizing pricing. This is a foundational role: you'll shape our AI strategy from day one and work directly with the director.

What you'll do

• •Design and build NLP pipelines that parse RFQs, purchase orders, and unstructured manufacturing documents
• •Build pricing models that learn from historical ERP data and market signals
• •Create recommendation systems that match suppliers to orders in milliseconds
• •Own the full ML lifecycle: data collection, feature engineering, training, evaluation, and deployment
• •Build robust, production-grade inference services that handle quoting and order workflows
• •Collaborate closely with product and engineering to ship AI features end-to-end

What we're looking for

• •Strong foundation in machine learning, NLP, and information retrieval
• •Experience building and deploying ML models in production environments
• •Proficiency in Python and ML frameworks (PyTorch, Transformers, scikit-learn)
• •Experience with LLMs, prompt engineering, RAG, and tool-calling patterns
• •Comfortable with messy, real-world data; you've wrangled unstructured text before
• •Bias toward shipping: you'd rather deploy something useful than perfect a notebook