Machine Learning Engineer

Location:

Manchester, GB

Opening Date: 22 Mar 2024

Full Time / Part Time: Full Time

Contract Type: Permanent

Closing Date of Applications – 5th April 2024

Our Story

Established in 2013, City Football Group is the world’s leading private owner and operator of football clubs, with total or partial ownership of thirteen clubs across the world. City Football Group also invests in other football related businesses and serves as a global commercial platform for our partners, whilst fulfilling our purpose of empowering better lives through football on a local and global scale, consistent with what “City” football has meant to people for over a century.

Our Winning Team

Our purpose is to empower better lives through football. We are proud of the role City Football Group clubs play in their localities, delivering positive economic, social and environmental impact through our operations and through programmes and activities that bring about meaningful, lasting change.

At City Football Group, our Football Intelligence (F.I.) team are continuing to evolve and enhance the impact of data-derived insights on the decision-making across our football clubs. Through our continued investment in Data Science, machine learning and simulation we are testing and refining footballing principles and building solutions that enable key stakeholders and performance practitioners to make better decisions faster.

This role will work within our Football Intelligence team to research, develop and deploy tools to enhance our understanding of how players – individually and collectively – react in certain situations, evaluating their decisions and the effectiveness of their actions. These tools will be trained on tracking data that the Football Intelligence department maintains, learning to value situations and identify patterns and structures that represent team playing styles.

Alongside strong mathematical, statistical, and programming skills, this role requires an individual with insatiable curiosity, imagination and creativity to come up with ideas to tackle football performance challenges and has the drive and discipline to learn and develop new skills.

City Football Group is a flexible work environment. While this position is based in Manchester, hybrid-working is an option.

This is Your City

As part of our team, you will be entitled to 26 days annual leave plus an additional day off for your birthday, private healthcare and dental cover, an annual discretionary bonus, plus a range of partnership and lifestyle discounts.

Your Impact

1. Working in the Football Intelligence team alongside Data Scientists and Engineers to research & build machine-learning models to identify and interpret complex patterns and structures in data and use this information to understand how teams play.
2. Develop tools from our models that enhance our ability to evaluate players, answer performance-related questions, and guide tactical decisions.
3. Play a leading role within the F.I. team in advancing our simulation & reinforcement learning environments.
4. Play a supporting role within the F.I. team to improve our data ingestion and analysis pipelines and ensure that key insights are rapidly delivered to football practitioners across the group.

What we are looking for

Essential

• PhD (or equivalent industry experience) in a quantitative discipline: computer science, mathematics, statistics, physics or engineering.
• Experience researching, developing, training and testing deep-learning models, reinforcement learning algorithms and/or large-language models (in any field).
• Highly proficient coding in python, particularly for data analysis and model development. Experience working with Tensorflow, PyTorch or other libraries for machine learning and artificial intelligence.
• Substantial experience in designing and training statistical models.
• Excellent communicator, including in presenting technical results to a non-technical audience.
• Ability to work in an agile manner suited to the innovative and fast-paced nature of the football industry.

Desirable

• Evidence of working with and deriving actionable insights from football data either as a hobby or within previous employment.
• Experience working with both structured and unstructured data-sources including text, video and spatio-temporal data.
• Experience with big data tools such as Databricks, Spark, Hadoop or similar.
• Experience with Azure, AWS or GCP cloud services or equivalent.
• Experience with data pipeline and workflow management tools such as Azure Data Factory, AWS data pipelines, Apache Airflow, etc.

City Football Group promotes equal opportunities in employment and we positively welcome applications from all candidates regardless of age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage and civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or belief, sex and sexual orientation.

We will screen all applicants and select candidates whose skills and experience seem to meet our needs. We will carefully consider your application during the initial screening and will contact you only if you are selected for an interview.

Employment is subject to the provision of proof of eligibility to work in the UK.

Due to our safeguarding promise, all UK based CFG roles will be subject to a DBS check upon commencing employment with us. This will be either a basic, standard or enhanced check depending on the job role and responsibilities.

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