Machine Learning Engineer

Our mission is to make sending and receiving flowers the joy that it should be, by harnessing technology, brand, and letterbox delivery. Now home to a family of 3 beautiful brands, we’re driven by our vision to create the destination for making life a little more thoughtful and beautiful. Starting with the Bloom & Wild brand, we're expanding our gifting offering to other categories like cakes, candles, and cocktails as part of our ambition to build Europe's #1 direct to consumer gifting destination.

Data Science at Bloom & Wild

You will be joining a small data science team, currently consisting of 3 data scientists within an overall Bloom & Wild team of over 350 people and growing! We are a small, driven team set on expanding usage of data science across Bloom & Wild. We collaborate closely with the data engineering and product teams, the rest of the technology team, a separate business intelligence and analytics team, our CRM and operations teams to help us identify areas of opportunities and bring our projects to life.

With millions of customers and hundreds of thousands of monthly transactions, we have a large and growing dataset that we use for training machine learning models. We have a number of models in production, from recommendation to forecasting engines, and a backlog of ideas to brainstorm, prototype, and test.

In terms of technologies: Python, Snowflake, dbt, git, ECS, Lambdas, and Airflow on AWS are part of our day to day. We welcome applications from candidates based within roughly two hours of the UK time zone, covering many European countries. This helps us stay aligned as a team while supporting flexible, remote-friendly ways of working. At Bloom & Wild, squads meet in person at least once per quarter in order to maintain connections, collaborate on larger projects, and have fun together.

Most of our team is based in the UK or The Netherlands and works in a flexible model, with choice in how often they travel to the office. Our squads meet in person at least once per quarter in order to maintain connections, collaborate on larger projects, and have fun together. We welcome applications from candidates based remotely within roughly two hours of the UK time zone, covering many European countries. This helps us stay aligned as a team while supporting flexible, remote-friendly ways of working.

What you’ll be doing

On a typical day for the data science team, we sync in the morning during stand-ups to discuss the on-going work and identify blockers or areas of collaboration. During the day, we will be brainstorming and prototyping models to solve specific business problems. Or, we will be writing robust, well-tested code for new model deployments or supporting the design of A/B tests. Or we can be collaborating with other teams to gain a better understanding of business domain, data, or requirements.

Your responsibilities will include:

• Have a critical role in architecting, implementing, and maintaining production-grade, low-latency ML services for ranking models, recommendation algorithms, and forecasting methods.
• Collaborate with data scientists, product managers, and other teams to brainstorm best approaches for solving the problems at hand, be they product-related or with our infrastructure.
• Help design experimentations to test our ideas and assess improvements to our models.
• Advise on data strategy to provide datasets for future data science projects.
• Deliver ML models with agreed engineering standards to ensure that our capabilities are resilient, scalable, and future-proof.
• Enhance our AWS-native MLOps platform, and guarantee high availability and low-latency inference for our models.
• Bring energy and positivity to the role, looking for every opportunity to learn and craft the role around our values: care wildly; think deeply, act swiftly; stay open, be curious; lead change for good.

You'll love this role if you… (What excites us)

• Have a solid foundation in traditional ML techniques and the model lifecycle, with the practical expertise to handle class imbalance, tune hyperparameters, and resolve common pitfalls like overfitting.
• Have demonstrable experience designing, deploying, and monitoring ML services to solve customer and business problems.
• Have strong programming skills in Python for delivering production-ready, well-structured, and documented code.
• Have experience with large datasets and are proficient with SQL, exposure to Snowflake and dbt is a plus.
• Are curious about customer needs and take a pragmatic, data-driven, and experimental approach to solving problems.
• Thrive in collaborative environments and work effectively with a range of people and teams.
• Bring a positive, optimistic mindset, overcoming setbacks and motivating those around you.
• Are keen to learn and stay up-to-date with the latest technologies and value sharing your knowledge with your peers.

It would be great if you also have...

• Experience working on an e-commerce site or in a fast-growing (preferably consumer-facing) start-up.
• Experience working in a fully-remote setting.

These are some of the skills and experience we think will enable success in this role, but please don’t worry if you are missing some of these. We’re committed to building a team made up of different strengths, skills, and experiences, so if you’re excited about our values, passionate about what you do, and would like to join us in doing things more thoughtfully, we’d love to hear from you.

Our ways of working

We do things a little bit differently. From inventing letterbox flowers to founding The Thoughtful Marketing Movement. We’re big on collaboration, empathy, knowledge sharing, and growth, and our values drive our priorities every day:

• Lead change for good: we have the guts to try new things and step up to do what matters most
• Think deeply, act swiftly: we make sure there’s thoughtful rationale behind our approach and always act swiftly to implement ideas
• Care wildly: we pour care and creativity into everything we do and pay attention to the things that make a difference
• Stay open, be curious: we’re open about what we’re doing and why, and we welcome challenges from each other

We really believe in the power of face-to-face connections - be that through a shared project, a learning and development opportunity, or an after work social - and trust our teams to make the right decisions (for them and us) about where and how they work each day. Our working patterns are flexible and vary across the business, depending on the type of work, need for collaboration, and personal and wellbeing circumstances.

Some of the good stuff

To care wildly for our customers, firstly we care wildly for our teams. We work hard to craft a culture of thoughtfulness and care, where there is a strong sense of inclusion and belonging, enabling all of our people to thrive and be successful each day.

Work that works for you

• Flexible working (core hours from 10-4pm)
• Work Abroad for up to 30 days each year
• Share in our success with a choice to take equity options from day 1
• 1 day per year to volunteer on a project that’s close to your heart
• We’ll support your commute to our office and site locations. Depending on your journey to work, this may include a Swapfiets, an NS business card or expense reimbursement
• Phone allowance

Time off

• 24 vacation days and an option to buy an extra 5 each year
• Happiness days (1 extra day each quarter for your personal ‘me time’)
• 1 celebration day per year, to celebrate a holiday that’s important to you
• Flexible bank holidays - trade a bank holiday for another day that fits your beliefs, values and celebration calendar

Health and wellbeing

• Mental health support through Open Up, including access to online therapy sessions
• Allies and champions groups
• Mental Health First Aiders and awareness training for our managers
• In person and virtual yoga every week
• Our office kitchen is stocked with healthy drinks and snacks to keep you going
• Workplace pension contributions

Growth & Development

• A flexible training framework for every stage of your career development through our Bloom & Learn programme
• Internal & external Speaker Sessions on a variety of different inspirational topics.

Moments that matter

• We love having lunch together! We offer daily fresh and healthy lunch options at our locations in Amsterdam and Amstelveen
• A BBQ-worthy rooftop terrace (Amsterdam HQ)
• Social & wellbeing monthly calendar
• We love to celebrate birthdays, anniversaries and other important milestones!
• Summer and End of Year events, team lunches and post-peak celebrations
• Irresistible discounts on our products, blooms & subscriptions!