
AI Phone - Applied ML / Model Engineer at Bjak (Taipei, Taiwan)
Bjak · Taipei, Taiwan·
Role details
Bjak at a glance
Southeast Asia's largest online insurance comparison platform, letting users compare, buy and renew insurance and roadtax from 16 insurers in one place.
Bjak is a BNM-licensed online marketplace where Malaysians compare quotes from 16 insurers and takaful operators, then buy and renew car, motorcycle, travel, life, medical and home insurance online. It bundles roadtax renewal, roadside assistance, car repair booking and AI tools around the core comparison engine.
Job description
About
We are reimagining the phone. AI phones need to be proactive, intuitive, intelligent and low cost. This is a mission critical for rest of the world to adopt intelligence. There are over 5 billion people using everyday applications such as email, messaging, notes, tasks, and calendars, yet most are not AI-native. Our mission is to build proactive applications and devices that bring intelligence into daily conversations, coordination and workflows, with minimal prompting.
Responsibilities
- Evaluate existing foundation models (e.g. Qwen, Llama, Gemma and other suitable open-weight models) against our target phone use cases.
- Identify which capabilities can be handled by existing models and where additional model adaptation or fine-tuning is needed.
- Experiment with SFT, LoRA/QLoRA and other lightweight fine-tuning techniques for specific use cases.
- Improve model performance for intent recognition, instruction following, tool calling, structured outputs, and multi-step task execution.
- Explore synthetic data generation and dataset construction for phone-specific workflows.
- Build evaluation datasets and benchmarks to measure model quality, reliability, and task completion.
- Compare different models and approaches, including local versus cloud inference.
- Work closely with the Agent Runtime team to improve model performance in actual agent workflows.
Requirements
- Strong background in Machine Learning, Deep Learning, or NLP.
- Practical experience working with LLMs and open-weight models.
- Experience with model fine-tuning, such as SFT, LoRA/QLoRA, and preferably RL or preference optimization.
- Experience with PyTorch and common ML tooling.
- Understanding of LLM evaluation, benchmarking, and dataset preparation.
- Ability to run experiments, analyze model failures, and translate findings into measurable improvements.
Nice to have
- Experience with agentic systems, function calling, and tool-use training.
- Experience with synthetic data generation and preference datasets.
- Experience with model distillation and smaller language models.
- Experience with deploying models in production environments.
Why work at Bjak
- Culture: “Results first” – outcomes over effort; direct feedback; flat organization with minimal bureaucracy; high ownership and speed.
- Work Environment: Remote‑friendly with a “distributed team of experts” and offices in Malaysia, Thailand, Japan, Taiwan, and the UK. Recruiting globally.
- Engineering Focus: Lean, autonomous teams that prioritise product excellence and swift delivery.
- Career Growth: Rapidly scaling company with 356 open roles (including Lead, Founder’s Office, iOS Engineer, DevOps, ML Engineer) – opportunities for impact and advancement.
- Note on Employer Rating: Current Glassdoor-style rating is 2.3/5 (198 reviews) – potential concerns around work‑life balance and compensation. Candidates should verify recent employee sentiment during interviews.