Senior / Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Applied AI

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

Responsibilities

• Apply hands-on ML expertise to close the last-mile gap between model capabilities and customer scientific workflows.
• Own post-training execution using methods such as SFT and RL (including DPO, PPO/GRPO) to align model behavior with customer requirements and feedback.
• Run evaluation loops to measure model quality, reliability, and fit for customer use cases.
• Convert customer learnings, data signals, and evaluation results 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 minimum of hands-on post-training experience, including SFT and RL methods such as DPO/PPO/GRPO, plus experience designing and iterating evaluation systems.
• Strong software engineering skills in Python and modern ML frameworks including PyTorch.
• Proven ability to debug ambiguous, high-stakes model behavior quickly using data, traces, logs, and qualitative feedback, with judgment shaped by repeated failure-mode experience.
• Deep familiarity with large language models, multi-modal models, or agentic AI systems.
• Clear communication skills to translate customer needs into technical approaches and to explain complex model behavior to technical and non-technical audiences.

Technologies

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

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 (Mixture of Experts) architectures.
• A track record of mentoring engineers and being a go-to technical expert, rather than focusing on people management or strategy ownership.

Location and Compensation

• Location: San Francisco, CA (onsite)
• Salary: USD 180,000 - 298,000 per year