Senior / Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Applied AI

Lila Sciences is hiring a Senior / Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Applied AI to connect frontier model progress to customer-specific scientific workflows through post-training, evaluation, debugging, and production integration.

Responsibilities

• Use hands-on expertise to close the gap between Lila’s model capabilities and customer scientific workflows
• Lead post-training work using SFT and RL alignment approaches such as DPO and PPO/GRPO
• Run evaluation loops to measure model quality, reliability, and customer fit
• Convert customer learnings, data signals, and evaluation outcomes into repeatable model improvement cycles
• Partner with AI researchers to translate model advances into reliable, usable capabilities
• Collaborate with Software to integrate model behavior into end-to-end product workflows
• Debug complex model failures using traces, evaluations, customer context, and scientific feedback

Requirements

• 1-2 years of hands-on post-training experience, including SFT and RL methods such as DPO/PPO/GRPO, with a track record of solving these problems repeatedly
• Strong software engineering skills in Python and modern ML frameworks such as PyTorch
• Proven ability to debug ambiguous, high-stakes model behavior quickly using data, traces, logs, and qualitative feedback
• Deep familiarity with large language models, multi-modal models, or agentic AI systems
• Clear communication skills for translating customer needs into technical approaches and explaining model behavior to both technical and non-technical audiences

Bonus Points

• Experience adapting models for customer-facing or production workflows, ideally in scientific, technical, or data-intensive domains
• Experience with RL post-training, such as RLHF, GRPO, or tool-augmented RL
• Experience building evaluation harnesses, model monitoring, or quality dashboards
• Experience training MoE architectures
• A track record of mentoring engineers and being recognized as a go-to technical expert (not people management or strategy ownership)

Tech Stack

• Python, PyTorch
• SFT
• RL: DPO, PPO, GRPO

Location: San Francisco, CA (onsite)

Salary: USD 180,000 - 298,000 per year

Minimum experience: 1 years