Machine Learning Engineer (London Area)

About Ankar

Innovation is the key to solving society's greatest challenges, and IP (intellectual property) plays a pivotal role in encouraging, driving, and capitalising on innovation.

At Ankar AI, our mission is to empower IP and R&D teams with AI tools to innovate more efficiently, thoroughly, and productively.

We are building a platform for inventors to accelerate their work throughout the entire IP lifecycle by providing them with best in class software, leveraging LLMs, for IP search, patent filing, freedom-to-operate analysis and infringement detection.

With the growing complexity and volume of IP today, traditional software is no longer meeting the needs of inventors. Many companies are turning to us to help them stay at the forefront of innovation by cutting through the noise of the millions of patents filed each year.

We believe we are the right team to tackle this problem.

• World class team of engineers and product leaders from Palantir, Amazon, Twitter, BCG, and top startups. Together, we have a proven track record of tackling tough problems and delivering mission-driven software.
• We are growing rapidly with increasing customer traction. We are already working with the world's most innovative organisations (Fortune 500 companies and top patent filers) to solve critical needs with our product.
• W e are backed by Tier 1 VCs and Angel Investors, including Index Ventures , co-founders of Hugging Face, CEO of Datadog, and product experts from DeepMind and OpenAI.

We are now growing the team to reach our ambitions. We hire the best and reward accordingly.

• Compensation & Equity : We offer competitive compensation and a generous equity package, making you an owner of the company.
• Career Growth : You have the opportunity to shape your role, own the impact, grow with the company, and build your skills to accelerate your career at Ankar and beyond.
• Meaningful Work : You will have full ownership in tackling challenging problems and help progress innovation in a world that is more and more faced with stagnation. We were founded in early 2024 and you have a real opportunity to shape what we do here.

What you will be doing

• Build a first-class AI-enabled platform in a high-ownership environment, where you’ll be leading development across the backend, ML service, ML infrastructure, and data pipelines.
• Fine-tune and deploy large language models for patent search, analysis, drafting, and other intellectual property workflows.
• Evaluate and improve large language model outputs for quality, relevance, and accuracy.
• Develop and optimise search retrievals and ranking models for large-scale patent and technical literature datasets.
• Productionise ML models within AWS , including deployment, monitoring, and integration with backend services.

What we are looking for

• Has a track record of building world class software. Ideally you have 3+ years of experience building ML applications.
• Thrives in a fast-paced & ambiguous environment. You work quickly and iteratively. We work in one-week sprints to ensure we are delivering value and and leading the market.
• Seeks ownership. You own your work, approach problems critically, and take pride in what you build. We believe this is the best way to for you to grow and for the product to succeed. We create the environment to help you thrive as an owner.
• Wants to work in-person. At this stage of our company, we believe being in the same space enables better communication, quicker decision-making, and fosters a collaborative culture that empowers us to outpace the competition.
• [Bonus points] Has experience deploying production ML applications, working with reranking & fine tuning strategies, and/or building large scale content indexing systems.

We believe in people who are driven by curiosity, willing to learn and able to go the extra mile. Please also reach out if you don't exactly check all these boxes.

What else you might want to know

• Location: London (no remote)
• Contract: Full-time
• Compensation: We pay competitive salaries and will reward you with a substantial equity package under the tax-efficient EMI scheme.
• Hiring process: (1) 30min introductory chat, (2) 1hr technical interview, (3) 2hr on-site, and (4) 20min final co-founder meeting. The process can be as fast you want it to be.

Learn more about our team and our ambitions here: