Amara Okafor
Best at Northwind Labs@amaraokafor · Staff Machine Learning Engineer — retrieval & evaluation
Amsterdam, Netherlands · Prefers Amsterdam · Hybrid · One month notice
About
I build machine learning systems that survive contact with real users. Ten years across search, ranking and retrieval, most recently leading the evaluation platform for a 40-person ML org. I care about measurement culture more than model novelty.
Experience
Staff ML Engineer
Lumen Search · 2022 — Present
Owned retrieval quality for 90M monthly queries; cut hallucinated answers by 41%.
Senior ML Engineer
Kestrel AI · 2019 — 2022
Built the offline evaluation harness now used across four product lines.
Data Scientist
Foldwork · 2016 — 2019
Ranking experiments and causal inference for marketplace pricing.
Self-nominations
Staff ML Engineer · Applied Research
Northwind is one of the few places treating evaluation as a first-class research problem rather than a dashboard.
“I would spend my first quarter rebuilding your eval harness so every research claim ships with a reproducible number.”
Principal Engineer · Clinical Data
Clinical retrieval is the highest-stakes version of the problem I have spent a decade on.
“Happy to walk your team through the failure taxonomy I built for medical Q&A retrieval.”
Professional comments
Jonas Weber · Engineering Director, Lumen
Amara raised the technical bar of every team she touched. Rare combination of rigour and pragmatism.
2026-07-26
Priya Nair · Product Lead
The evaluation platform she built is still the reason we ship confidently.
2026-07-18
Contact
Skills
Looking for
- Desired titles
- Staff ML Engineer, Head of ML
- Industries
- Artificial Intelligence, Healthcare Technology
- Work type
- Hybrid
- Preferred city
- Amsterdam
- Salary expectation
- €135,000 — €160,000
- Availability
- One month notice
Education
MSc Computer Science
University of Lagos · 2014 — 2016
Certificates
- AWS Machine Learning Specialty
- Stanford CS330 — Meta Learning
Languages
- English (native)
- Igbo (native)
- Dutch (B1)
Portfolio & resume
- github.com/amaraokafor
- Evaluation essays
- Resume: amara-okafor-cv.pdf