Senior Machine Learning Research & Applied Engineer

Slim Frikha

Falcon @ Technology Innovation Institute · Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates · he/him
Slim Frikha

I'm a Senior Machine Learning Research & Applied Engineer with 12 years of experience building and scaling production-grade AI systems across early-stage startups, billion-dollar scale-ups, and national AI initiatives.

My core strength lies at the intersection of research and engineering. While my background is rooted in applied ML and system-building, I've also led hands-on research efforts, most recently in lab environments focused on LLMs and generative models. I enjoy taking novel ideas from prototype to production, bridging the gap between experimentation and real-world impact.

Senior ML Research Engineer · Technology Innovation Institute

Jul 2024 — Present
Abu Dhabi, UAE

Core member of the foundational models team, contributing to the development and open-sourcing of Falcon LLMs, spanning Falcon 3, Falcon H1, and Falcon H1R covering the full model lifecycle.

  • Full-lifecycle LLM work: pre-training, post-training & alignment, inference, and evaluation
  • Development tooling: built tooling streamlining the full LLM cycle (training, data, evaluation, and release). Apply software engineering best practices to a research setting bringing engineering rigor to fast-moving research.
  • Open-source contributions: Delivered targeted improvements to key open-source repositories including Torchtitan, ChatLearn, veRL, lm-evaluation-harness, and evalchemy.
PyTorchTorchtitanMegatron-LMvLLMDockerKubernetesSageMakerPostgreSQL

Senior ML Applied Engineer / Science & Tech Lead · Contentsquare

Jan 2022 — Jun 2024
Paris, France

Led a team of 4 ML engineers advancing semantic web understanding with NLP and LLMs, reducing manual setup time for new clients and enabling potential savings of up to $1 million in 2024.

  • Spearheaded design and deployment of deep learning models for large-scale web content structuring, boosting data enrichment and product features.
  • Oversaw ML projects end-to-end: hiring, mentoring, setting research direction, aligning with product goals, solution development, deployment and improvement on user feedbacks.
  • Drove cross-functional initiatives with product, engineering, and leadership to translate research into scalable production systems.
  • Improved internal ML tooling for rapid experimentation and deployment.
  • Contributed to patent filings and guided research strategy through scientific literature reviews.
  • Recognized as a top R&D performer for leading innovation projects shaping the team's technical roadmap.

Senior ML Applied Engineer · Contentsquare

Sep 2018 — Dec 2021
Paris, France

Contributed to the core R&D AI team, building deep learning solutions to extract and structure web content at scale for predictive UX analytics.

  • Led projects on DOM tree classification and unsupervised URL clustering for semantic layout analysis.
  • Managed ML pipelines end-to-end: from product requirements to production deployment.
  • Applied software engineering best practices: stateless design, packaging, containerization, APIs, CI/CD.

Lead ML Engineer · HrFlow.ai (formerly Riminder)

Oct 2016 — Jul 2018
Paris, France

Led ML efforts for intelligent recruiting tools using deep learning in NLP and computer vision.

  • Developed and deployed core models for resume parsing, layout analysis, and semantic extraction.
  • Designed multi-modal pipelines for structured data extraction from unstructured CVs.
  • Collaborated on AI roadmap and SaaS integration in a fast-paced, lean team.

Data Scientist · EY

Mar 2015 — Jul 2016
Paris, France

Worked on data-driven consulting projects across retail and finance sectors, delivering insights through machine learning, data engineering, and visualization.

Information Systems Consultant · EY

May 2014 — Feb 2015
Paris, France

Auditing and consulting in information systems.

Projects original work

Point a lens at the papers: local agentic RAG over arXiv reports, with grounded, clickable citations.

PythonRAGLLM Agents
Contributions upstream repos

A PyTorch native platform for training generative AI models.

Distributed Training

Volcano Engine Reinforcement Learning for LLMs.

RLPost-training

A flexible and efficient training framework for large-scale alignment tasks.

Alignment

A framework for few-shot evaluation of language models.

Evaluation

Automatic evals for LLMs.

Evaluation

Falcon-H1R: Pushing the Reasoning Frontiers with a Hybrid Model for Efficient Test-Time Scaling

2026
arXiv · Contributor

Falcon-H1: A Family of Hybrid-Head Language Models Redefining Efficiency and Performance

2025
arXiv · Contributor

Welcome to the Falcon 3 Family of Open Models!

2024
Hugging Face Blog · Contributor

How Contentsquare reduced TensorFlow inference latency with TensorFlow Serving on Amazon SageMaker

2021
AWS Machine Learning Blog · Co-author
Paris Machine Learning Applications group · Presenter

ENSTA Paris, Institut Polytechnique de Paris

2011 — 2014
Engineering, computer science | Master of Science

Top-5 French engineering school. Coursework in information-systems architecture, software architecture, and security. Engineering double degree.

Machine Learning
Machine learningNLPDistributed training
Frameworks
PyTorchMegatron-LMTorchtitan
Inference & Serving
FastAPITritonvLLM
Infrastructure
DockerSageMakerKubernetes
Other
WebDatabases
Languages
English · ProfessionalFrench · ProfessionalArabic · Native