Job Description

Company Description

Vitol is a leader in energy and commodities. Vitol produces, manages and delivers energy and commodities to consumers and industry worldwide. In addition to its primary business of trading, Vitol is invested in infrastructure globally, with $10+billion invested in long-term assets.

Vitol’s customers include national oil companies, multinationals, leading industrial companies and utilities. Founded in Rotterdam in 1966, today Vitol serves its customers from more than 40 offices worldwide. Revenues in 2025 were $343bn.

Our people are our business. Talent is precious to us and we create an environment in which individuals can reach their full potential, unhindered by hierarchy. Our team comprises more than 65+ nationalities and we are committed to developing and sustaining a diverse work force.

Learn more about us here. This role is located in Houston, TX onsite 5x a week

Job Description

Vitol’s Applied ML team in Houston works directly with the trading desks to find commercial value through data and applied data science . Projects start with a trader’s or analyst’s question, not with a model.

You will work alongside traders and analysts from the first conversation through to production and beyond. You frame the problem with them, review results with them as the work progresses, and stay with the tool after it ships.

You own both the science and its path to production. The work is fast and phased, and it is judged on one thing: whether the desk uses it to make better decisions.

What You Will Do

• Work side by side with traders and analysts to turn market questions into scoped projects, each with a clear commercial hypothesis and a defined go/no-go point.
• Review progress with the desk throughout each project, not just at handoff. Show intermediate results early, test them against the desk’s market knowledge, and change course when the signal or the priority shifts.
• Build LLM, NLP and multimodal pipelines that extract structured signals from unstructured sources such as outage reports, news, filings, and web content.
• Design and run quick experiments to test feasibility across modelling approaches, and stop weak ideas early.
• Build models that predict outage impacts, classify disruption patterns, and detect anomalies and regime changes in fundamental data.
• Take the models that prove out into production. That means packaged, tested, deployed through CI/CD, with monitoring and drift detection built in from day one.
• Deliver insights where traders already work: Teams, alerts, and the Vision Excel and Python tooling. Standalone dashboards are not the default.
• Source data through the Vision platform. When you need a new source, work with the Vision team rather than building side pipelines, and follow the existing web-scraping architecture.
• Evaluate commercial AI platforms and tools against real desk problems, and give a clear recommendation.
• Explain results, uncertainty, and limits in plain terms to traders, analysts, and senior stakeholders.

Qualifications

• Applied experience: 5+ years applying machine learning and NLP to messy, real-world data, including models you took to production and supported after launch.
• Desk-facing track record: You have worked directly with commercial users in trading, finance, or a similar fast-paced setting, and you can point to decisions your work changed.
• Quantitative foundation: Master’s or PhD in statistics, mathematics, physics, engineering, or equivalent depth gained in industry. Strong statistics and experimental design.
• LLMs and NLP: Hands-on experience building extraction and classification pipelines with LLMs, covering evaluation, prompt and retrieval design, and cost and latency trade-offs.
• Python and ML stack: Python with scikit-learn, PyTorch, and HuggingFace. You write production-quality code that others can review and maintain.
• Production engineering: Docker, AWS, CI/CD, and MLOps practice, including model versioning, monitoring, and retraining.
• Time series and signals: Experience with anomaly detection and with combining signals across multiple time-series and text sources.
• Communication: You can explain what a model means for a trade in two sentences, and you are comfortable being challenged by people who know the market better than you do.
• Nice to have: Knowledge of energy or commodities markets, graph modelling, sentiment analysis, or agentic workflows and MCP.

Additional Information

What Success Looks Like in Year One

• Traders and analysts on at least two desks bring problems to you directly.
• At least two proof-of-value projects reach a go/no-go decision, and at least one is in production and in regular use on the desk.
• Your production models are monitored, documented, and supportable by the wider team. Failures are found by monitoring, not by a trader.
• Failed experiments are stopped early and written up, so the team does not repeat them.
• You have built reusable components, such as extraction pipelines and evaluation harnesses, that the rest of the team uses.

The Environment

Vitol is one of the world’s largest independent energy traders, and Houston is one of its core trading offices. The Applied ML team sits close to the desks, so feedback is fast and the people using your work are just a few desks away.

We look for scientists and engineers who own outcomes, not just tickets. You will have room to choose your approach, and you will be expected to deliver work that traders can rely on.

Comprehensive benefit coverage includes:

• Medical
• Dental
• Vision
• Paid Vacation
• 401k with company contributions
• Life insurance
• Short-term & Long-term disability

All your information will be kept confidential according to EEO guidelines.