Senior AI Engineer - Machine Learning - Frontier Industrial AI Startup

Senior AI Engineer - Machine Learning - Frontier Industrial AI Startup

Palo Alto, CA (you can work from home 3x/week)

The company has about 70 employees and a team of 10 AI Scientists and Engineers.

The company was founded and funded with a very large seed round from one of the leading companies in its massive industry. The company's industrial AI software uses machine learning to optimize manufacturing processes, improve quality, and increase production efficiency.

In this position you would be developing and deploying large-scale machine learning systems, with a focus on pretraining, fine-tuning, and serving tabular foundation models. You would be building and optimizing ML infrastructure, including data pipelines, distributed training, inference, deployment automation, and model monitoring. You would collaborate with AI researchers and engineering teams to turn cutting-edge ML research into scalable, reliable production systems while leading technical architecture and mentoring engineers.

The company will pay a base salary up to $250k, plus yearly bonuses bringing yearly cash compensation up to $300k, plus stock options which could be lucrative.

Job Responsibilities:

- Partnering with AI Scientists to build and productionize our tabular foundation models — owning the pretraining, fine-tuning, serving, and monitoring infrastructure and scaling it from research prototype to large-scale production.

- Building reliable, performant ML infrastructure across research, staging, and production: data, training, and inference pipelines, CI/CD, observability, and reproducible workflows, tuned for latency, throughput, and resource usage.

- Designing evaluation and monitoring that reflect how models are actually used, including handling real-world data challenges such as distribution shift and limited labels.

- Setting engineering standards, leading design and architecture reviews, and driving adoption of new modeling approaches, algorithms, and infrastructure.

- Partnering with product and engineering teams to integrate ML into user-facing systems.

- Defining scope and roadmap for multi-team initiatives, driving cross-team and cross-functional alignment across AI Science, engineering, and product, and mentoring senior engineers to raise the organization's technical bar.

Qualifications:

- Either A) A Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Machine Learning, or a related technical field, plus at least 6 years of professional experience, or B) A Master's Degree or PhD plus at least 4 years of professional experience.

- Strong programming skills in Python with a solid grounding in algorithms and data structures, and deep proficiency with the Python data/ML stack (NumPy, Pandas, scikit-learn, and PyTorch or TensorFlow) for end-to-end model development.

- At least 3 years of building production-grade ML infrastructure — data pipelines, training/inference workflows, and deployment automation — with solid software engineering fundamentals (Git, testing, code review, CI/CD, and containerization/orchestration such as Docker and Kubernetes).

- A track record of shipping ML systems with real attention to scalability, performance, and reliability.

- Demonstrated technical leadership: owning the roadmap for multi-quarter, multi-team efforts, driving cross-team and cross-functional alignment, and mentoring other engineers.

- Experience optimizing training and inference for large-scale models, including distributed/parallel training (multi-GPU/multi-node).

Nice to have:

- Experience pretraining, fine-tuning, and serving foundation models and transformers of any modality (tabular, timeseries, language, vision, etc.) at scale.

- Experience deploying ML in production across batch, real-time, or edge settings.

- Experience with models under real-world data challenges — distribution shift, limited or noisy labels, or continual learning.

- Development in a cloud environment (AWS, Azure, or GCP).

- Productive with AI-assisted / agentic coding tools (e.g. Claude Code, Copilot) and eager to push their limits — building workflows and agents that raise the team's velocity.

About Skyrocket Ventures

Skyrocket Ventures is a recruiting firm for hundreds of high growth technology companies that range from industry leaders to top-tier startups. This opportunity is with one of our client companies for a full-time permanent hire. Please only apply if you are authorized to work in the U.S.

Please note that even if this job is not a perfect match, we encourage you to apply as long as it is in the ballpark. Companies are often flexible in hiring candidates who do not perfectly fit their written job description, as long as the most important qualifications are there and the candidate is good in general.

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