Machine Learning Engineer – Remote (6‑month contract)

About the role

The Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA) is seeking a Machine Learning Engineer to support the Arab Development Portal. The contractor will design, develop, and deploy advanced machine‑learning models that generate data‑driven insights on social, economic, and technological trends across the Arab region.

Key responsibilities

• Design, train, evaluate and deploy supervised and unsupervised ML models for forecasting, classification, clustering, anomaly detection and NLP tasks.
• Build and maintain robust ETL pipelines to ingest and transform data from national statistics, UN databases and open‑data platforms.
• Manage reproducible, version‑controlled ML experiments using tools such as MLflow or DVC.
• Perform feature engineering, model selection, hyper‑parameter tuning and ensemble techniques to optimise performance.
• Explore, benchmark and integrate large language models (open‑source and proprietary) for document understanding, information extraction and multilingual question‑answering.
• Develop agentic solutions leveraging deep‑research architectures to automate multi‑step analytical workflows.

Required profile

• Strong background in machine learning model development and deployment at scale.
• Experience building data pipelines and handling heterogeneous data sources.
• Familiarity with version‑control and experiment‑tracking frameworks.
• Ability to work independently in a remote setting and deliver results within a six‑month timeframe.

Required skills

• MLflow
• DVC
• ETL pipeline development
• Large Language Model integration