Machine Learning Engineer (3-6 years)

Location: Milan (hybrid)

Type: Full-time

About Shop Circle

Shop Circle is building the next-generation AI-first software group. We acquire, scale, and modernise mission-critical software businesses, turning them into AI-powered systems of action.

We operate across 40+ products and 100,000+ customers globally, with a strong focus on embedding AI directly into workflows to drive both revenue and efficiency.

The role

We are looking for a Machine Learning Engineer to build and improve AI systems that work reliably at scale.

You will be part of Circle X, our centralised AI team, driving automation and embedding AI across our entire portfolio.

Your focus will be on quality, reliability, and performance of AI systems, and on building shared intelligence across products.

This role directly impacts:

• CX automation accuracy
• Product intelligence
• Cost efficiency and margins

What you will do

• Design and improve RAG systems (retrieval, chunking, embeddings, ranking)
• Build evaluation frameworks for LLM outputs (quality, hallucination, benchmarking)
• Optimise latency, cost, and reliability of AI systems
• Develop data pipelines for training, fine-tuning, and inference
• Improve model and prompt performance through systematic testing
• Build reusable ML components used across multiple products
• Partner with engineers and product teams to productionise and scale systems
• Support AI due diligence in acquisitions (data advantage, defensibility, feasibility)

What we are looking for

• 3–6 years experience in Machine Learning / Applied AI
• Strong coding skills in Python
• Experience working with:
• LLMs (OpenAI, Anthropic, open-source models)
• RAG architectures
• Embeddings and vector databases (e.g. Chroma, Pinecone)
• Experience building evaluation or benchmarking systems
• Solid understanding of ML fundamentals and backend systems
• Strong problem-solving skills and attention to detail

Nice to have

• Experience with fine-tuning or model adaptation
• Familiarity with AWS / Bedrock
• Experience optimising systems for cost and latency at scale
• Exposure to multi-product or platform environments

Why this role matters

Most companies can ship AI features.

Very few can make them work reliably in production.

That’s the gap this role fills.

Apply if you want to build AI systems that actually work in production, at scale.