The role
Nelum is seeking an AI Engineer to build and operate the AI features inside the platform: an assistant that answers from Nelum's cited reference data on how a commodity moves between jurisdictions, document reading that turns a letter of intent or an assay certificate into structured fields, and search across offers and company capabilities.
The constraint that defines the role is that every model output is bounded by a schema. The assistant cannot recommend a counterparty or invent a number, because there is no field for it to return one in. You will extend what the AI does without loosening that guarantee.
Key responsibilities
Assistant and grounding
- Build the retrieval that grounds answers in Nelum's reference library, with every statement traceable to its source.
- Design structured outputs and the server-side checks that discard anything the source data does not support.
- Keep the assistant useful in English, Chinese and Arabic.
Document intelligence
- Extract structured data from trade documents — letters of intent, assay certificates, export permits, packing lists — with the confidence of each field made explicit.
- Handle scans, multiple languages and incomplete documents without inventing what is not there.
Search and retrieval
- Maintain the embeddings and vector indexes behind offer and capability search.
- Measure relevance, and improve it without turning search into a ranking of counterparties.
Evaluation, cost and reliability
- Build evaluation sets and regression tests for every AI feature.
- Monitor latency, quotas and cost per account, and design graceful fallbacks when a model is unavailable.
Ideal candidate
Three or more years building production ML or LLM systems, with a strong software-engineering foundation.
Experience with retrieval-augmented generation, structured outputs and evaluation; TypeScript and Python; and a major cloud AI platform. Experience in fintech, compliance, legal or trade documentation is an advantage.
Qualifications
- A degree in computer science or a related field, or equivalent experience.
Engagement
Full-time. Full-time.
About Nelum
Nelum is a technology company building compliance-as-a-service and market-access infrastructure for artisanal and small-scale mining and the wider commodities sector. The platform helps licensed miners, mining cooperatives and commodity businesses become verified, compliant and buyer-ready, and improves transparency, traceability and responsible sourcing across international supply chains.
The platform is built to operate internationally. It is commodity-agnostic and corridor-based: a new producing country or a new material is a configuration of the same system rather than a separate build. The commodity scope is precious metals; tin, tantalum and tungsten; battery and technical metals; precious stones; and oil.
Our first corridor is Nigeria to Dubai, and our first material is gold — chosen because it is the hardest provenance environment in commodities. The company is structured for that reach from the outset: a UK parent, an intended operating entity in Dubai, engineering resourced internationally, and field operations beginning in Nigeria. The public platform runs in English, Arabic and Chinese.