Senior Software Engineer ML - Contractor position

Janea Systems (USA) is a dynamic team of the best & brightest software engineering specialists and solutions innovators, from around the world. From kernel to cloud, we provide high-impact software development services to Fortune 500 companies.
We are seeking an exceptionally talented Senior ML Engineer (Contractor) to join our rapidly growing consulting team. 
This is a future opportunity role, not a live start. We evaluate strong freelance ML engineers ahead of client demand so that when a project matches your profile, we come to you with concrete scope, rate and start date — not with a three-week search. Being accepted into the pool is not a guarantee of work, and we will be direct with you about timing: it may be weeks or it may be months. In exchange, we keep our process short, we do not ask for unpaid work, and once you are in, you hear about relevant projects before we go to market.

Basis

Independent contractor. You invoice through your own company or registered sole-trader entity

Rate

Your quoted hourly or daily rate, in EUR or USD. Agreed in writing before any engagement starts

Commitment

Typically 40 hours per week unless specified differently, depending on the project

Duration

Typically 1–6 months per engagement. Extensions are common.

Location

Fully remote. Most engagements require a minimum of four hours of daily overlap with US business hours.

Working setup

You work as part of a Janea team on client projects, and are Client facing

What engagements look like:

• Taking an ML or LLM proof-of-concept to production, with the reliability and cost characteristics a large enterprise needs.
• Designing and hardening data and training pipelines for enterprise ML systems.
• ML platform and MLOps work: deployment, versioning, monitoring, evaluation, CI/CD for models.
• Building LLM and RAG systems, including retrieval quality, evaluation and cost control.
• Filling a specific, deep gap in a client engineering team for a defined period.
• Short technical audits and advisory work on an existing ML stack.

What we need from you:

• 6+ years of software engineering experience, including 3+ years shipping ML systems into production 
• Strong Python, at production code quality. You are comfortable being the person responsible for what runs.
• Real depth in at least one of: LLM and agent systems; ML platform and MLOps; ML data and pipeline engineering — plus working competence in the other two.
• PyTorch or TensorFlow, and the production stack around them.
• Containers and Kubernetes in at least one major cloud (AWS, Azure or GCP).
• Workflow orchestration: Airflow, Kubeflow, Argo, Dagster or Prefect.
• Testing, benchmarking, CI/CD and monitoring practices applied to ML systems, not just to application code.
• Ability to turn an ambiguous business problem into a technical plan without close supervision. 
• Client-facing English. You can explain a technical trade-off to a stakeholder who is not an ML specialist.
• Your own equipment and a legal entity to invoice from.

Useful, not required:

• Agent frameworks: LangChain, LangGraph, LlamaIndex.
• RAG systems in production, with real evaluation and cost discipline.
• NLP background.
• Observability for ML: Datadog, Langfuse, Weights & Biases.
• Cloud certification (Any).
• For lead-level engagements: you have led a small team or owned an ML workstream end to end, including the client relationship.
• Open-source contributions, publications, or technical writing we can read.

Why freelance with Janea

• Substantive work. Fortune 500 engineering problems, on core systems, with our own senior engineers alongside you.
• Short chain of command. You talk to the people making technical decisions. Minimal process overhead.
• Clear commercial terms. Rate, scope and invoicing terms agreed in writing before you start.
• Repeat work. Contractors who deliver get first look at the next relevant project.

Process:

1. Hackerrank coding challenge (50 min max)
2. A 40-minute call with our recruitment team — your background, the kind of work you want, availability and rate.
3. A 120 minute technical conversation with a Janea engineer.
4. If we both want to proceed: NDA and framework agreement signed, and you enter our vetted pool. We then contact you when a matching project comes in.

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