Director of Machine Learning Engineering

Job Title : Machine Learning Research Short-term Consultant (6 months) :

Location : Washington DC, USA

The effective management of non-financial risks such as E&S and Integrity risks, for which the WBG has been a global leader, is critical to ensure infrastructure investments deliver timely, sustainable and inclusive results. However, our government counterparts and client companies face persistent challenges in effectively implementing and supervising safeguards, especially in large-scale civil works projects and private sector companies. Despite major strides in strengthening environmental and social (E&S) and Integrity safeguards across development finance institutions, supervision remains labor-intensive, uneven, and mainly reactive. A key challenge is the lack of real-time identification and proactive management of these risks. Traditional supervision of World Bank financed projects often depends on disparate, non-aggregated or digitized information streams-such as manual news reviewing, field visits, supervising engineers' site reports, grievance records, and E&S progress reports that can be delayed or incomplete. This is compounded by often weak client capacity, evolving project contexts and complexities, and information asymmetry between project sites, clients and task teams. In fragile or remote contexts, where field presence is limited or unsafe, these challenges are even more acute impacting access to projects areas for our clients as well as limiting task teams' implementation support missions in country, and the field.

The Role :

Our WBG / IFC team is seeking a proactive and innovative Machine Learning Research consultant to join as part of the award-winning Innovation project. The initiative aims to leverage WBG internal and external data to unearth valuable insights from a non-financial risk perspective. This will involve sentiment analysis on large scale data, building agentic solution that combine different datasets internal and external to WBG. You will also work on designing a robust framework for fine-tuning and improving AI solutions.

During the 6-month engagement, you will have the opportunity to apply cutting-edge Machine Learning technologies to analyze comprehensive datasets from emerging markets and derive unprecedented insights. Our team utilizes a diverse range of tools and techniques in practical applications, with access to ample computing resources.

As an ML Research consultant, you will be involved in a meaningful and challenging innovation project that requires the application of innovative mathematical and computational analysis. You will be assigned a mentor who will guide your work and provide continuous feedback. Additionally, you will have access to senior staff who are industry leaders in their respective fields.

Participating in this initiative will provide you with a profound understanding of our distinctive approach to investment, risk and technology. Moreover, you will directly contribute to our mission of eradicating extreme poverty and promoting prosperity on a sustainable planet.

Qualifications :

• A post-graduate degree in Machine Learning or a related field, or practical experience in developing novel machine learning algorithms. Exceptional candidates with a proven track record in online data science competitions, such as Kaggle, will also be considered.
• Experience in one or more of the following areas : classical ML, deep learning, reinforcement learning, Statistical Machine Learning, natural language processing (NLP), and Generative AI.
• Strong analytical and mathematical skills are essential, as off-the-shelf methods may not always be applicable to our unique datasets. You should be capable of developing your own models.
• Proficiency in programming and experience with Python, scikit-learn, PyTorch, LangChain, HuggingFace, Pandas and Jupyter
• Familiarity with cloud technology (Azure, Databricks, etc.) is preferred.

Previous experience in finance is not mandatory, although an interest in finance and the motivation to rapidly acquire knowledge in the field are desirable for this role.

Why Apply?

We encourage you to seize this exciting opportunity to contribute to cutting-edge research and make a meaningful impact on global development.