Senior / Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Applied AI

The role

You will adapt Lila's AI models to customer-specific scientific needs through post-training and evaluation. You will work at the intersection of AI Research, model engineering, and product deployment to create reliable workflows.

What you will do

• Apply hands-on expertise to close the gap between model capabilities and customer-specific scientific workflows.
• Run post-training work using SFT and RL to align model behavior.
• Run evaluation loops to measure model quality, reliability, and customer fit.
• Turn customer learnings and evaluation results into model improvement cycles.
• Partner with AI researchers to translate model advances into usable capabilities.
• Work with Software to integrate model behavior into end-to-end product workflows.
• Debug complex model failures using traces, evaluations, customer context, and scientific feedback.

Required qualifications

• Minimum 1-2 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.
• 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 and explaining complex model behavior.

Nice to have

• 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 sought out as a go-to technical expert.

Benefits

• Medical, dental, and vision coverage
• Employer-paid life and disability insurance
• Flexible time off with generous company wide holidays
• Paid parental leave
• Educational assistance program
• Commuter benefits, including bike share memberships for office based employees
• Company subsidized lunch program

About the company

Lila Sciences is building Scientific Superintelligence™ to solve humankind's greatest challenges. The company combines advanced AI models with proprietary AI Science Factory™ instruments into an operating system for science.