Senior / Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Applied AI
Lila Sciences9 hours ago
Cambridge, MA, USA or San Francisco, CA, USASenior / Staff+
H1B sponsor
Base Salary
$180k - $298k/yr
Responsibilities
- Adapt LILA models to customer-specific scientific workflows.
- Run model post-training using SFT and reinforcement learning methods including DPO, PPO, and GRPO.
- Design and operate evaluation loops measuring model quality, reliability, and customer fit.
- Use customer learnings, data signals, traces, evaluations, and scientific feedback to improve model behavior.
- Partner with AI Researchers and Software teams to translate model advances into reliable product capabilities.
- Debug complex model failures and mentor engineers as a technical expert.
Requirements
- At least 1–2 years of hands-on post-training experience and evaluation system design.
- Strong software engineering skills in Python and modern machine learning frameworks such as PyTorch.
- Experience debugging ambiguous, high-stakes model behavior using data, traces, logs, and qualitative feedback.
- Deep familiarity with large language models, multimodal models, or agentic AI systems.
- Clear communication skills for translating customer needs into technical approaches and explaining model behavior.
- Preferred experience adapting models for customer-facing or production workflows, especially in scientific, technical, or data-intensive domains.
- Preferred experience with RL post-training such as RLHF, GRPO, or tool-augmented RL; evaluation harnesses, model monitoring, or quality dashboards; and MoE architectures.
- A track record of mentoring engineers and serving as a go-to technical expert is preferred.
Benefits
- Full-time U.S. employees receive medical, dental, and vision coverage, employer-paid life and disability insurance, flexible time off, company-wide holidays, paid parental leave, educational assistance, commuter benefits including bike share memberships for office-based employees, and a subsidized lunch program.
- International full-time employees receive benefits tailored to their region.
- The role includes bonus potential and early-stage equity in addition to base compensation.
Categories
About Lila Sciences
Lila Sciences builds an AI-driven research platform and autonomous lab systems for life science, chemistry, and materials R&D teams. Its products combine large AI models with robotic instruments to plan, run, and analyze experiments, integrating into customer-specific scientific workflows. The privately held company serves pharma, materials, and energy organizations and is venture-backed, including a Series A financing in 2025.