{"id":826584,"url":"https://alion.io/job/absentia-senior-ai-machine-learning-engineer","title":"Senior AI/ML Engineer","company":{"id":670578,"name":"Absentia Labs","domain":"absentia.bio","url":"https://alion.io/company/absentia","size_band":null,"is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Ashby","truth_index":null},"role":"AI/ML","role_family":"AI/ML","seniority":"senior","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"remote","remote_scope":"stated_countries","remote_scope_basis":"board_field","remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"inferred","locations":["Boston, United States","New York, United States","San Francisco, United States","Seattle, United States","San Jose, United States","Austin, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":["US"],"hiring_countries_total":1,"salary":{"min":155000,"max":200000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":200000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":5,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"Diffusion Models","optional":false},{"name":"Machine Learning","optional":false},{"name":"PyTorch","optional":false},{"name":"Fine-tuning","optional":true},{"name":"GitHub","optional":true},{"name":"Knowledge Distillation","optional":true},{"name":"Model Distillation","optional":true},{"name":"Multimodal AI","optional":true},{"name":"Reinforcement Learning","optional":true},{"name":"RLHF","optional":true},{"name":"Transfer Learning","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-08-06T02:16:58Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-11-06","last_verified_at":"2026-11-08T15:22:46Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":94,"trust":{"level":"stale","repost_count":1,"flags":["stale"],"days_open":94},"description":"About Absentia Labs\nAbsentia Labs is building intelligent systems that sit at the intersection of AI, biology, chemistry, and large-scale engineering. Our goal is to translate complex scientific data into machine intelligence capable of reasoning, generalizing, and driving discovery.\nBiomedical data is fragmented, noisy, and deeply interconnected. Turning it into a useful signal requires not only strong data foundations but also carefully designed learning systems that can scale across modalities, tasks, and uncertainty regimes. This role focuses on building and training those systems.\nThe Role\nAs a Senior AI/ML Engineer, you will lead the design, training, and deployment of large-scale machine learning models that form the core of Absentia Labs’ AI capabilities. You will work at the boundary between model architecture, training systems, and production infrastructure, with significant ownership over technical direction.\nThis role is intended for engineers who have trained large models in real production environments, understand the realities of scale, and can reason about both learning dynamics and systems constraints.\nWhat You’ll Do\nDesign, train, and evaluate large-scale models, including Large Language Models (LLMs), diffusion models, and Graph Neural Networks (GNNs).\n\nOwn end-to-end training pipelines, from dataset interfaces and batching strategies to distributed training and checkpointing.\n\nMake principled decisions about model architecture, objective functions, optimization strategies, and scaling laws.\n\nBuild and optimize distributed training systems (data parallelism, model parallelism, sharding, mixed precision).\n\nCollaborate closely with data engineers to define ML-ready datasets and streaming interfaces.\n\nTranslate ambiguous scientific or product requirements into robust ML solutions.\n\nDrive model evaluation, ablation, and iteration with a focus on generalization, stability, and reproducibility.\n\nContribute to architectural decisions around model serving, inference efficiency, and lifecycle management.\n\nProvide technical leadership through design reviews, mentorship, and cross-team collaboration.\n\nWho You Are\nYou are a senior ML engineer who thinks holistically about models as systems. You are comfortable operating under uncertainty, making trade-offs between compute, data, and performance, and owning outcomes from research through production.\nYou care deeply about training dynamics, failure modes, and scaling behavior, and you have the scars to prove it.\nYou Likely Have\n5+ years of industry experience in machine learning or applied AI roles.\n\nDemonstrated experience training large-scale models in production settings, not just prototypes.\n\nHands-on expertise with LLMs, diffusion models, and/or GNNs.\n\nStrong proficiency in PyTorch (or equivalent deep learning frameworks).\n\nDeep understanding of distributed training, including parallelism strategies and performance optimization.\n\nExperience working with large datasets and high-throughput data pipelines.\n\nStrong software engineering fundamentals: clean code, testing, reproducibility, and debugging at scale.\n\nAbility to clearly communicate technical trade-offs to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.\n\nBonus If You Have\nExperience with reinforcement learning, fine-tuning, or preference-based optimization (e.g., RLHF).\n\nFamiliarity with model compression, distillation, or inference optimization.\n\nExperience deploying models in production inference systems.\n\nExposure to multimodal learning or foundation models.\n\nPrior work in startups or fast-moving R&D environments.\n\nContributions to open-source ML frameworks or research codebases.\n\nNote: Prior experience with molecular or biomedical models is not required. We value strong ML systems experience and the ability to transfer learning across domains.\nWhat We Offer\nCompetitive compensation, including meaningful equity participation, allows you to share directly in the long-term success and growth of the company.\n\nThe opportunity to work on foundation-level ML systems applied to real scientific problems.\n\nOwnership over model design and training strategy, not just implementation.\n\nClose collaboration with data, infrastructure, and scientific teams.\n\nHigh autonomy, low bureaucracy, and a culture that values technical depth.\n\nFlexible remote or hybrid work arrangements.\n\nHow to Apply\nPlease submit your resume and a brief note describing your experience training large-scale models. Links to GitHub repositories, papers, or technical write-ups are encouraged.\nOur Commitment\nAbsentia Labs is an equal opportunity employer. We believe diverse teams build better systems and stronger science, and we encourage applicants from all backgrounds to apply.","description_format":"text","description_chars":4737,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":5,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Equity","Hybrid work"],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"United States","iso":"US","kind":"country"},{"name":"New York","iso":null,"kind":"city"},{"name":"San Francisco","iso":null,"kind":"city"},{"name":"San Jose","iso":null,"kind":"city"},{"name":"Seattle","iso":null,"kind":"city"},{"name":"Boston","iso":null,"kind":"city"},{"name":"Austin","iso":null,"kind":"city"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Machine Learning","Drug Discovery"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-09-12T14:51:39Z"},{"event":"close","at":"2026-10-14T17:46:39Z"},{"event":"reopen","at":"2026-11-06T04:15:30Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":10,"band":"cold","label":"Long shot","p_open":1,"p_active":0.362,"p_room":0.28,"age_days":94,"expected_fill_days":30,"reasons":["conf:2","win:tail","crowd:"],"computed_at":"2026-11-08T05:47:12Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":200000,"is_top_pay":false},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/absentia-senior-ai-machine-learning-engineer","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/absentia-senior-ai-machine-learning-engineer.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-11-08T19:07:36Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":39967,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-11-09T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.1,"usd":0.01,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":670578},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=670578"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fabsentia-senior-ai-machine-learning-engineer"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":2,"usd":0.2},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fabsentia-senior-ai-machine-learning-engineer"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.1,"usd":0.01},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fabsentia-senior-ai-machine-learning-engineer"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/absentia-senior-ai-machine-learning-engineer\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fabsentia-senior-ai-machine-learning-engineer"}],"agent":{"mcp":"https://alion.io/mcp/jobs","mcp_open":"https://alion.io/mcp/open","next":[{"tool":"get_job","arguments":{"id":826584}},{"tool":"search_jobs","arguments":{"company":"absentia.bio","detail":"compact"}},{"tool":"match_people","arguments":{"job_id":826584},"note":"people open to offers who fit this vacancy"}],"note":"The same data through MCP tools: https://alion.io/mcp/open needs no sign-in (compact searches, postings, people); https://alion.io/mcp with an Alion account has everything. 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