Founding Machine Learning Engineer

About the Role This is a founding-level Machine Learning Engineer role at a well-funded Series A AI data and services startup based in Mountain View, CA. You will join a small, high-caliber team building and scaling core ML systems from the ground up — bridging research and engineering to design, train, and ship production-grade models for top AI frontier labs. This is a high-ownership position where your work directly shapes the company's technical culture, infrastructure, and long-term ML impact. The company specializes in high-quality training and post-training data, reinforcement learning environments, and intelligent agents — serving both frontier AI labs and enterprise customers. Visa sponsorship is not available for this role. What You'll Do • Build and optimize end-to-end ML pipelines, from data ingestion through to deployment. • Implement and fine-tune LLMs, embeddings, and generative models for real-world applications. • Develop efficient training and inference systems leveraging distributed compute. • Partner with data and product teams to translate ideas into measurable ML impact. • Contribute to model monitoring, evaluation, and continual learning frameworks. • Establish best practices in model versioning, reproducibility, and scalability. What We're Looking For Required: • 3–10 years of experience as an ML Engineer, Applied Scientist, or Research Engineer. • Proficiency in Python and at least one major ML framework: PyTorch, TensorFlow, or JAX. • Strong grasp of ML fundamentals — data preprocessing, feature engineering, model training, and optimization. • Hands-on experience with distributed systems and cloud ML infrastructure (AWS, GCP, or Azure). • Familiarity with MLOps tooling such as Weights & Biases or MLflow. • Comfort working with large datasets and high-throughput systems. • Strong bias for action, ability to work autonomously, and genuine excitement about building from scratch. Compensation & Benefits • Base salary: $220,000 – $300,000 USD annually • Equity participation as a founding team member • Opportunity to establish technical direction and culture at an early-stage, high-growth company Location • On-site — Mountain View, California, United States • Visa sponsorship is not available for this position Find Jobs in Germany on Arbeitnow