Staff Machine Learning Engineer
RemotePasadena, California, United States
Job Summary
Set technical and product direction for LLM, agentic, and NLP systems while designing AI-driven experiences for high-stakes decision-making. Build distributed, agentic systems at company-wide scale, including tool-using conversational agents, retrieval-grounded reasoning, and multi-turn context orchestration. Transform messy real-world data into trustworthy signals through entity recognition, relation extraction, summarization, and knowledge-graph generation. Deploy and operate low-latency, high-concurrency inference on Triton and vLLM to handle real load. Establish evals and labeled-data flywheels to steer work rather than gate it, partnering with cross-functional teams to drive issues to root cause. Raise the engineering bar with better patterns and practices that lift the whole team.
Required Qualifications
- BS, MS, or PhD in computer science, a related field, or equivalent practical experience
- 6+ years building production backend software, with a track record of shipping and operating ML-driven functionality
- Mastery of data structures and algorithms, and the judgment to translate user needs into practical solutions
- Hands-on depth with LLMs and agentic systems (prompt and context engineering, tool use, retrieval and RAG) and the broader ML toolkit such as PyTorch, plus experience defining evals to measure and improve quality
- Fluency authoring production APIs in Python
- High agency and a bias to action in ambiguous, fast-moving problems
- The curiosity, generosity, and love of teaching that lifts a whole team
- Any offer of employment is conditioned on an applicant or employee being able to meet any applicable government contract requirements
Desired Qualifications
- Rust a plus
- Experience with knowledge graphs, information retrieval at scale, or LLM fine-tuning and post-training
- A pull toward high-stakes, real-world problems where the work actually ships and someone depends on the answer
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