Principal AI - Large Language Models

Uney GmbH seeks a Principal AI Engineer to lead the research, development, and secure deployment of large language models within its privacy-first security platform.

This position combines technical leadership with hands-on engineering to integrate large language models into detection, classification, and response workflows. The role is responsible for driving end-to-end LLM research and operational deployment, ensuring model performance, privacy compliance, and real-world security impact.

Responsibilities

• Lead the research, design, and implementation of Transformer-based architectures optimized for security tasks.
• Evaluate architectural designs for efficiency, robustness, privacy, and security.
• Define threat-detection-specific requirements, including phishing, BEC, malware, and policy violation classification.
• Optimize foundation model pre-training and distributed training strategies for compute efficiency.
• Develop parameter-efficient fine-tuning strategies for downstream security tasks.
• Build efficient Small Language Models (SLMs) for edge or customer environments with low latency and memory footprint.
• Implement model compression, quantization, pruning, and distillation techniques.
• Ensure robust and secure deployment while maintaining high performance in constrained environments.
• Design and manage dataset pipelines, including privacy-preserving and synthetic data generation.
• Define evaluation frameworks for adversarial robustness, false positive rates, bias, safety, and interpretability.
• Monitor model performance and implement continuous improvement processes.
• Partner with Product and Security teams to translate business requirements into ML solutions.
• Mentor teams and establish best practices for AI safety, privacy, and responsible ML development.
• Align research outcomes with operational deployment and platform capabilities.

Requirements

• PhD in ML, NLP, CS, or equivalent industry experience.
• 10+ years in ML/AI, with 5+ years focused on LLMs at scale.
• Proven hands-on experience training, fine-tuning, and deploying LLMs in production with measurable impact.
• Proficient with PyTorch.
• Proficient with distributed training frameworks (FSDP, DeepSpeed, Ray).
• Strong understanding of privacy-preserving ML and security-focused AI applications.
• Experience with inference optimization frameworks (ONNX, TensorRT, vLLM, llama.cpp).
• Scripting for automation and model deployment (Python, Bash, PowerShell).
• Excellent leadership and team management capabilities.

Nice to have

• Experience in security, privacy, or safety-critical domains preferred.
• Publications in top-tier ML/NLP/security venues.
• Experience with edge/mobile deployment or embedded ML systems.
• Familiarity with RLHF, alignment, and responsible AI practices.

About the company

Uney GmbH operates a privacy-first security platform in a fast-paced and high-stakes environment.

• The company operates a privacy-first security platform.
• The environment is fast-paced and high-stakes.