Principal Machine Learning Engineer

Bjak • New York, NY

7d

About The Position

A1 is building a proactive AI system that understands context across conversations, plans actions, and carries work forward over time.
You will be responsible for turning research direction into working, production-grade ML systems. This role owns the execution layer of A1’s intelligence – training pipelines, inference systems, evaluation tooling, and deployment.

Requirements

• Strong background in deep learning and transformer-based architectures.
• Hands-on experience training, fine-tuning, or deploying large-scale ML models in production.
• Proficiency with at least one modern ML framework (e.g. PyTorch, JAX), and ability to learn others quickly.
• Experience with distributed training and inference frameworks (e.g. DeepSpeed, FSDP, Megatron, ZeRO, Ray).
• Strong software engineering fundamentals – you write robust, maintainable, production-grade systems.
• Experience with GPU optimization, including memory efficiency, quantization, and mixed precision.
• Comfort owning ambiguous, zero-to-one ML systems end-to-end.
• A bias toward shipping, learning fast, and improving systems through iteration.

Nice To Haves

• Experience with LLM inference frameworks such as vLLM, TensorRT-LLM, or FasterTransformer.
• Contributions to open-source ML or systems libraries.
• Background in scientific computing, compilers, or GPU kernels.
• Experience with RLHF pipelines (PPO, DPO, ORPO).
• Experience training or deploying multimodal or diffusion models.
• Experience with large-scale data processing (Apache Arrow, Spark, Ray).

Responsibilities

• Build and own end-to-end ML pipelines spanning data, training, evaluation, inference, and deployment.
• Fine-tune and adapt models using state-of-the-art methods such as LoRA, QLoRA, SFT, DPO, and distillation.
• Architect and operate scalable inference systems, balancing latency, cost, and reliability.
• Design and maintain data systems for high-quality synthetic and real-world training data.
• Implement evaluation pipelines covering performance, robustness, safety, and bias, in partnership with research leadership.
• Own production deployment, including GPU optimization, memory efficiency, latency reduction, and scaling policies.
• Collaborate closely with application engineering to integrate ML systems cleanly into backend, mobile, and desktop products.
• Make pragmatic trade-offs and ship improvements quickly, learning from real usage.
• Work under real production constraints: latency, cost, reliability, and safety

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Principal
• Education Level: No Education Listed