{"id":177634,"url":"https://alion.io/job/lila-senior-staff-machine-learning-engineer-applied-ai","title":"Senior / Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Applied AI","company":{"id":65163,"name":"Lila Sciences","domain":"lila.ai","url":"https://alion.io/company/lila-ai","size_band":"201-500","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Greenhouse","truth_index":{"grade":"A","score":88,"open_postings":42,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0.286,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":86,"computed_at":"2026-10-24T06:02:35Z"}},"role":"AI/ML","role_family":"AI/ML","seniority":"staff","employment_type":null,"work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Cambridge, United States","San Francisco, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":180000,"max":298000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":298000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"DeepSpeed","optional":false},{"name":"JAX","optional":false},{"name":"LLM","optional":false},{"name":"Machine Learning","optional":false},{"name":"Megatron-LM","optional":false},{"name":"Multimodal AI","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"PyTorch","optional":false},{"name":"Ray","optional":false},{"name":"TensorFlow","optional":false},{"name":"Agentic Workflows","optional":true},{"name":"Function Calling","optional":true},{"name":"GRPO","optional":true},{"name":"LLM Evaluation","optional":true},{"name":"Mixture of Experts","optional":true},{"name":"Post-training","optional":true},{"name":"RAG","optional":true},{"name":"RLHF","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-07-01T17:14:20Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-10-16","last_verified_at":"2026-10-24T11:48:22Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":114,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":0,"flags":[],"days_open":114},"description":"Your Impact at LILA\nWe are growing our Applied AI org and seeking talented Senior/Staff Machine Learning Engineers with expertise in LLM training, evaluation, and production-oriented ML systems. You’ll work on improving Lila’s AI models for customer-specific scientific needs, with a focus on turning frontier model capabilities into reliable workflows that can be evaluated, iterated, and used in real customer contexts. This is a rare chance to join an early team with the autonomy, flexibility, and compute to tackle frontier science problems.\nApplied AI sits at the intersection of AI Research, model engineering, and product deployment. The team partners closely with AI Researchers and Software teams to adapt Lila models to customer workflows, improve model quality through experimentation, and ensure model behavior works well end to end inside the application.\nThis role is ideal for someone who can bridge research and engineering: training or adapting models, building evaluation loops, debugging model behavior, and collaborating across AI and Software to move promising capabilities into production-quality systems.\nWhat You'll Be Building\nClose the last-mile gap between Lila AI model capabilities and customer-specific scientific workflows.\nBuild evaluation loops that measure model quality, reliability, and customer fit.\nDesign experiments to improve model performance across applied customer use cases.\nFeed customer learnings, data signals, and evaluation results back into the Lila AI model improvement cycles.\nPartner with AI researchers to translate model improvements into usable capabilities.\nWork with Software to integrate model behavior into end-to-end product workflows.\nDebug model failures using traces, evaluations, customer context, and scientific feedback.\nBuild reusable tooling for model adaptation, evaluation, and deployment workflows.\nWhat You'll Need to Succeed\nStrong experience building, training, adapting, or evaluating machine learning models.\nStrong software engineering skills in Python and modern ML frameworks such as PyTorch, JAX, or TensorFlow.\nExperience with distributed ML training frameworks (Megatron-LM, TorchTitan, DeepSpeed, Ray)\nExperience designing experiments, evaluation metrics, or test sets for model performance.\nAbility to debug model behavior using data, traces, logs, and qualitative feedback.\nExperience working across research and engineering teams to move ML capabilities into usable systems.\nFamiliarity with large language models, multi-modal models, or agentic AI systems.\nClear communication skills for translating customer needs into technical model improvements.\nBonus Points For\nExperience adapting models for customer-facing or production workflows.\nExperience with scientific, technical, or data-intensive customer use cases.\nExperience building evaluation harnesses, model monitoring, or quality dashboards.\nFamiliarity with retrieval-augmented generation, tool use, or agentic workflows.\nExperience with RL post-training, such as RLHF, GRPO, or tool-augmented RL.\nExperience training MoE architectures.\nExperience working with product or customer-facing teams to translate needs into ML improvements.\nCompensation\nWe offer competitive base compensation with bonus potential and generous early-stage equity. Your final offer will reflect your background, expertise, and expected impact.\nU.S. Benefits. Full-time U.S. employees receive a comprehensive benefits program including medical, dental, and vision coverage; employer-paid life and disability insurance; flexible time off with generous company wide holidays; paid parental leave; an educational assistance program; commuter benefits, including bike share memberships for office based employees; and a company subsidized lunch program.\nInternational Benefits. Full-time employees outside the U.S. receive a comprehensive benefits program tailored to their region. USD salary ranges apply only to U.S.-based positions; international salaries are set to local market.\nExpected Base Salary Range\n$180,000—$298,000 USD\nAbout LILA\nLila Sciences is building Scientific Superintelligence™ to solve humankind's greatest challenges. We believe science is the most inspiring frontier for AI. Rather than hard-coding expert knowledge into tools, LILA builds systems that can learn for themselves.\nLILA combines advanced AI models with proprietary AI Science Factory™ instruments into an operating system for science that executes the entire scientific method autonomously, accelerating discovery at unprecedented speed, scale, and impact across medicine, materials, and energy. Learn more at www.lila.ai.\nGuided by our core values of truth, trust, curiosity, grit, and velocity, we move with startup speed while tackling problems of historic importance. If this sounds like an environment you'd love to work in, even if you don't meet every qualification listed above, we encourage you to apply.\nWe’re All In\nLila Sciences is committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity or Veteran status.\nInformation you provide during your application process will be handled in accordance with our Candidate Privacy Policy.\nA Note to Agencies\nLila Sciences does not accept unsolicited resumes from any source other than candidates. The submission of unsolicited resumes by recruitment or staffing agencies to Lila Sciences or its employees is strictly prohibited unless contacted directly by Lila Science’s internal Talent Acquisition team. Any resume submitted by an agency in the absence of a signed agreement will automatically become the property of Lila Sciences, and Lila Sciences will not owe any referral or other fees with respect thereto.","description_format":"text","description_chars":5809,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":null,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Equity","Flexible time off","Parental leave"],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Materials Science & Nanotechnology","Laboratory & Pharmaceutical Robotics","AI Research Labs","AI for Science"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-08-30T23:46:07Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":35,"band":"fade","label":"Fading","p_open":1,"p_active":0.794,"p_room":0.44,"age_days":114,"expected_fill_days":86,"reasons":["conf:2","velocity","win:tail","crowd:brand"],"computed_at":"2026-10-24T06:02:35Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":298000,"is_top_pay":true},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/lila-senior-staff-machine-learning-engineer-applied-ai","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/lila-senior-staff-machine-learning-engineer-applied-ai.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-24T13:55:52Z","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":20094,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-25T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"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":65163},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=65163"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Flila-senior-staff-machine-learning-engineer-applied-ai"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"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%2Flila-senior-staff-machine-learning-engineer-applied-ai"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"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%2Flila-senior-staff-machine-learning-engineer-applied-ai"},{"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/lila-senior-staff-machine-learning-engineer-applied-ai\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Flila-senior-staff-machine-learning-engineer-applied-ai"}]}