Principal Machine Learning Engineer, Applied AI

Highlights

• Shape how Lila's AI models adapt to customer-specific scientific needs.
• Turn frontier model capabilities into reliable, evaluable customer workflows.
• Partner with research and product to deliver end-to-end science workflows.

What they offer

• Competitive base compensation with bonus potential
• Generous early-stage equity
• Medical, dental, and vision coverage
• Employer-paid life and disability insurance
• Flexible time off with company-wide holidays
• Paid parental leave
• Educational assistance program
• Commuter benefits and subsidized lunch program

Ideal candidate

Seasoned ML systems builder who loves closing the last-mile gap to real customer impact in science. You thrive on ambiguous model behavior, customer feedback loops, and mentoring engineers toward reliable products.

Requirements

• Minimum 2-3 years of hands-on post-training experience (SFT, RL methods such as DPO/PPO/GRPO) and evaluation system design
• Strong software engineering skills in Python and modern ML frameworks like PyTorch
• Demonstrated ability to debug ambiguous, high-stakes model behavior using data, traces, logs and feedback
• Experience leading technical work across research and engineering teams
• Deep familiarity with large language models, multi-modal models, or agentic AI systems
• Clear communication skills for translating customer needs and explaining model behavior