AI Engineer (Junior/Mid)

About the Role

Cake by VPBank is one of Vietnam's fastest-growing digital banks — 7M+ users and on a mission to become the NextGen AI Bank. We believe generative AI will redefine banking: smarter, faster, and more human.

As an AI Engineer, you'll build agentic systems and the models behind them, and take them all the way to production. We're always open to a challenge, and we're looking for engineers who are too.

Key Responsibilities

• Build agentic systems end-to-end with a deep understanding of every component you build or use — how it works and why.
• Build models on demand — LLMs, speech models, ASR, and any other model the system needs to work better and run more efficiently — by training from scratch or fine-tuning (using modern methods such as parameter-efficient fine-tuning, preference optimization, and reinforcement learning).
• Own your models end-to-end — from data and evaluation to production, where you optimize them for latency, cost, and reliability and keep improving them.
• Follow responsible AI practices — fairness, safety, and compliance with banking regulations.
• Collaborate with product, backend, data, and MLOps teams.

Must-Have

• Bachelor's or Master's in Computer Science, AI/ML, NLP, or a related field — or equivalent hands-on experience.
• Hands-on experience building ML/GenAI systems — around 1–3 years for Mid; for Junior, strong internships, research, or projects count.
• Experience building agentic systems and a real understanding of how they work under the hood.
• Hands-on experience training models from scratch and fine-tuning — at any scale, including research or personal projects.
• Experience putting a model you trained into production and optimizing it.
• Solid foundations in deep learning and transformer architectures, with fluency in modern frameworks (PyTorch, Hugging Face).
• An appetite for hard, unfamiliar problems.

Nice-to-Have

• Big bonus: an AI award or a publication at a top venue (NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, ACL, Interspeech, CVPR…).
• Understanding of GPU architecture — memory hierarchy, kernels (CUDA/Triton), and techniques like FlashAttention.
• Experience with modern serving stacks (vLLM, TGI, SGLang).
• Cloud & containerized deployment — GCP preferred; AWS or Azure welcome; Kubernetes a plus.
• Vietnamese or low-resource NLP/speech, or fintech / digital-banking experience.

Why You'll Love Working at Cake

• Real scale, real impact — your models are used daily by 7M+ people.
• A modern cloud-native stack — GCP, Vertex AI, Kubernetes, Airflow — plus our own large-scale physical GPUs for real training runs.
• Grow fast across LLMs, speech, and agents, with mentorship from senior engineers.
• A collaborative, high-performing team where experimentation and innovation are the norm.

Our Benefits

• Competitive compensation — 13th-month salary and up to 3 months of performance-based bonus.
• MacBooks supplied to all technical team members.
• BE Corp budget (varies by level) for transport, food, and car bookings in the Be app.
• Social insurance contribution based on your individual level.
• Annual health checks and premium medical care (PTI) after probation.
• 15 days of annual leave for all staff.
• Company trips, team-building, and quarterly or annual happy-hour events.