Machine Learning Engineer

About the job Senior Machine Learning Engineer 📍 Hybrid – San Mateo, CA 💰 $180K–$240K + Equity Why this role Join a fast-growing AI startup transforming a massive, traditional industry using cutting-edge machine learning. This team is building intelligent search, recommendation, and extraction systems powered by LLMs, embeddings, and vector databases - solving complex real-world problems at scale across millions of products and documents. What you’ll do • Build advanced search, ranking, and recommendation systems • Develop NLP and document extraction pipelines from unstructured data • Fine-tune and deploy LLMs into production environments • Design retrieval architectures using embeddings and vector databases • Build agentic AI workflows capable of multi-step reasoning • Work closely with product and engineering teams to ship AI-powered features end-to-end The technical challenges • Scaling retrieval and recommendation systems across huge datasets • Combining LLMs, search, embeddings, and structured extraction into production systems • Building autonomous AI agents with memory and planning capabilities • Balancing cutting-edge ML research with real-world performance and reliability What they’re looking for • Strong ML engineering or applied AI background • Experience with NLP, retrieval, search, ranking, or recommendation systems • Hands-on experience with Python, PyTorch/TensorFlow, and modern ML infrastructure • Experience deploying scalable ML systems into production • Bonus points for vector DBs, LLM fine-tuning, or agentic AI frameworks Why join • Highly technical, product-focused ML work • Real ownership and impact from day one • Strong engineering culture in a fast-moving startup • Competitive salary, equity, and hybrid flexibility