Senior Machine Learning Engineer

About Picnic

Building the supermarket on wheels
Started in 2015 in the Netherlands, Picnic now delivers groceries to millions across three countries, growing fast. The idea? We’re bringing back the milkman. Imagine personal service and fresh products but in a modern, sustainable way. We’re looking for bright minds to shape the future of grocery shopping with us. Ready to join the revolution?

Tech at Picnic
At Picnic we merge advanced technology with a customer-centric approach. We aim to create a simple, affordable, and enjoyable grocery shopping experience. Work on various aspects like our mobile app, store backend, internal development platforms, delivery routing, warehouse logistics, and ML models – all built in-house. We’re looking for problem-solvers who thrive in a collaborative environment. We are open to junior and experienced software, data and ML engineers. Our diverse team welcomes innovative and bold ideas.

Picnic perks
1. With a diverse team of over 80 nationalities, you’re sure to find your people
2. You’ll work in an awesome scaleup environment with the freedom to drive your own projects and create a visible impact
3. We offer a well rounded relocation package to help you make your new step

“At Picnic, we build the technology that powers the transition towards a sustainable food
supply chain where we delight customers with more choice, fresher products, and less
waste. The team behind this innovation loves to crack hard problems, uses data to
explore unbeaten paths, and strives to stay ahead of the curve in this fast-paced
industry.”
– Daniel Gebler, CTO

Want to learn more? Check out our blogs!

Position

As a Senior Machine Learning Engineer at Picnic, you’ll work on creating intelligent, automated systems to solve our company’s biggest challenges, at scale. You won’t stop at building a model—you’ll productionize it alongside the wide variety of machine learning models we already have running in production.

Working closely with business leads and other machine learning engineers, you’ll identify and solve problems leveraging machine learning. When working with our Inbound team, you’ll work on improving the Temporal Fusion Transformer model that predicts demand on the article level—a direct input for our ordering system. With our Payment team you could work on our real-time payment fraud detection system— to ensure we block intentional fraud, not happy customers. You’re more than a model builder: you’re a blend of internal consultant, software engineer, and applied mathematician.

You might think, ‘Sounds good, but 80% of my job is going to be cleaning data.’ Not here. Our data is registered, logged, consistent, and immaculate. We’re a mature team with the infrastructure, tools, and expertise to get models into production.

Check out some of our previous machine learning projects here: https://blog.picnic.nl/tagged/machine-learning

What you’ll do

You’ll work on various projects and fields, such as:

• Forecasting demand: order volumes, article demand, used Picnic-wide
• Forecasting the number of trips: making sure we have enough vehicles and runners
• Fraud and outlier detection: helping us keep bad-guys out of our store
• Recommendation systems: generating useful in-app grocery suggestions for our customers
• Search and ranking:  helping our customers find exactly what they need
• Predicting delivery drop-off times for our distribution: making sure we’re on-time at every customer

You will definitely:

• Work closely with business leads to identify opportunities, define business cases, and scope out the requirements
• Own your own project from inception to production, to continuous improvement
• Develop tools and enhancements for our cloud-based data science platform

Technologies we use

• Python (Scikit-learn, PyTorch, Tensorflow, FastAPI - or we build our own packages)
• SQL (Snowflake, Postgres)
• Git
• Kubernetes
• Docker

Your qualification

• Master’s degree or higher in AI, Computer Science, Mathematics, or a related field
• At least 4 years of experience in data science
• Experience with maintaining production-level ML solutions, with solid software engineering and ML principles
• Strong Python and SQL skills
• Superb communication skills and ability to transfer knowledge to business stakeholders and the rest of the data science team
• Comfortable with taking responsibility, showing initiative, and working independently
• Ability to think outside the box and an anything-is-possible mindset
• Quality control: commitment to excellence, performance, and efficiency
• Experience with Docker, Kubernetes, and CI is a plus

What we offer

Every expert was once a beginner! 

• You’ll get plenty of opportunities to challenge yourself and grow, including the Picnic Tech Academy, Lunch & Learn sessions, and tailored soft skills training. We also offer free professional weekly language courses.

Make a difference

• You’ll work in an awesome scale-up environment with the freedom to drive your own projects and create a visible impact. 
• Our fully electric vehicles and sustainable business model mean you’ll also be contributing to making the world a better place! 

Teamwork makes the dream work

• With more than 80 nationalities across 3 countries, you’ll be part of a diverse company with plenty of cool stuff to get involved with, from board game evenings to after-work drinks to our company ski trip and more!

You are what you eat

• You’ll get freshly prepared, healthy lunches and snacks (with plenty of vegetarian, vegan, and halal options). Coffee snob? Don’t worry, our amazing Picnic barista has you covered.

Stay healthy 

• Mental health is important. As well as having the option to speak with Picnic colleagues who act as confidential advisors, our collaboration with OpenUp gives you easy access to professional psychologists, along with workshops and materials. 
• There are plenty of sports communities and events to get involved with, from tennis to yoga to climbing! 

Attractive package

• We offer competitive compensation and a pension plan that looks out for your future self as well as 25 vacation days per year, so you can recharge your batteries 

Benefits for expats 

It can be daunting starting a new job AND moving to a new country. That’s why we offer lots of support for our many expat colleagues, including: 

• Relocation package: If you join Picnic from abroad, we’ll cover your trip to Amsterdam, sponsor your Visa, and offer you a month of accommodation while you settle in (as long as regulations allow).
• In the Netherlands, we offer support with your first tax report as well as arranging the 30% ruling.
• From health insurance to living arrangements to pet passports, there are always colleagues who’ve faced the same challenges and are more than happy to help! 

Additional details

Commitment to equal opportunities 

Picnic is an equal opportunity employer—this means that all decisions regarding applications will be based on qualifications and merit. Applicants will be regarded independently of age, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, ethnicity, skin color, civil status, religious beliefs, physical or mental disability, or any other factors protected by law. 

At Picnic, we celebrate and value our differences and are committed to building a safe and inclusive working environment where everyone can be themselves.

Our recruitment process

• Phone screening
• Home assignment
• Interviews
• Assessment day
• Offer