Hiring: Staff/Senior Machine Learning Research Engineer, Intelligent Systems Company: Scale AI Location: San Francisco Bay Area Job Posted Time: 2026-09-16 15:22:22 Employment Type: Full-time Target Skills & Keywords : Fine-tuning, Foundry, LLM, Machine Learning About the job Experience: •5+ years of experience as an ML engineer or applied/research scientist, including direct experience training or fine-tuning models in production systems Required Skills: •Move across AIS’s core problem areas as needed — training/fine-tuning, inference, memory and retrieval, evaluation and observability, orchestration and tool-use infrastructure, applied research on new agent capabilities — going wherever the technical leverage is highest rather than owning one fixed surface •Build AI agents and internal tooling that reduce bottlenecks in AIS’s own processes — cutting down time spent on repetitive evaluation, data, or experimentation work so teams can focus on the hard problems •Partner with other ML engineers, software engineers, product managers, customers, data annotators, and Forward Deployed Engineers to take your work from idea to production and translate enterprise and government requirements into robust ML capabilities •Set AI/ML technical direction, mentor senior and staff-track engineers and scientists across teams, and raise the bar on experimental rigor org-wide Qualifications: •PhD in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or a related field •Broad, hands-on fluency across the agentic ML stack — model training and fine-tuning (SFT, RLHF/RLAIF, reward modeling), evaluation and observability infrastructure, and agent architecture (tool use, planning, memory, multi-agent orchestration) — with demonstrated depth or expertise in at least one area within the AI/ML domain •Demonstrated ability to move across problem areas rather than specialize in one corner of the ML stack — comfortable picking up unfamiliar parts of a system quickly •Track record of partnering with software engineers to productionize research and experimental work, not just deliver a one-off analysis — and of pushing code to production yourself when needed — with a genuine drive for pathfinding, 0-to-1 problems where the right approach isn’t yet known •Track record of setting AI/ML technical direction — choosing methods and architectures that other teams adopt — and collaborating across functions to navigate ambiguous requirements and bring them to production •Track record of mentoring engineers and scientists, giving and receiving direct, substantive technical feedback at a staff level, and influencing decisions and standards beyond your own team — through design reviews, technical writing, or shaping how other teams approach a problem •Published research, open-source contributions, or patents in agent training methods, LLM alignment, or applied ML •Track record of taking a novel training method or agent architecture from prototype to something running reliably in production, navigating ambiguity along the way •Prior experience as a technical lead setting direction across multiple teams or problem areas Compensation: •$250,000 - $350,000 / year Interested candidates, please apply directly through the job posting on company's career page or try via AI auto apply on this platform. Don't miss this opportunity to join a forward-thinking team!