Senior/Staff Machine Learning Research Engineer, General Agents, Enterprise GenAI

Scale AI · San Francisco

Data & AIposted 6mo ago

Scale AI is the data foundation for AI, helping organizations build and deploy reliable production AI applications. We partner with leading enterprises and government organizations to accelerate their AI initiatives through our data annotation platform, generative AI solutions, and enterprise AI capabilities.

About the General Agents Team

The General Agents team, part of Scale’s Enterprise organization, builds robust general agents for customer use cases and applications. The team sits at the intersection of frontier agent development and real-world deployment, translating state-of-the-art reasoning and agentic capabilities into reliable, production-grade systems that drive real economic value. Our agents are scalable systems built around recurring enterprise problem domains, with a strong emphasis on generalization, extensibility, and deployment across many customers.

About the Role

As a Senior/Staff Machine Learning Engineer (MLE) on the General Agents team, you’ll play a critical role in designing, building, and deploying production-ready AI agents that solve high-impact enterprise problems. You will work across the full agent lifecycle—from model and system design to evaluation, deployment, and iteration—bridging cutting-edge agentic techniques with the constraints and requirements of real customer environments.

You will:

Design and implement end-to-end agent systems that combine LLM reasoning, tool use, memory, and control logic to solve recurring enterprise use cases.
Build scalable, reliable agent architectures that can be deployed across many customers with varying data, tools, and constraints.
Develop evaluation frameworks, datasets, environments, and metrics to measure agent performance, reliability, and business impact in production settings.
Collaborate closely with product managers, customers, data annotators, and other engineering teams to translate enterprise requirements into robust agent designs.
Productionize frontier agent techniques (e.g., planning, multi-step reasoning and tool-use, multi-agent patterns) into maintainable, observable systems.
Own deployment, monitoring, and iteration of agent systems, including failure analysis and continuous improvement based on real-world usage.
Contribute to technical direction and architectural decisions for general agent development best practices and methods, with increasing scope and leadership at the Staff level.

Ideally you’d have:

5+ years of experience building and deploying machine learning or AI systems for real-world, production use cases.
Strong engineering fundamentals, supported by a Bachelor’s and/or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, AI, or equivalent practical experience.
Deep understanding of modern LLMs, prompt-, context-, and system-level optimization, and agentic system design.
Proven proficiency in Python, including writing production-quality, testable, and maintainable code.
Experience building systems that integrate models with external tools, APIs, databases, and services.
Ability to operate in ambiguous problem spaces, balancing research-driven approaches with pragmatic product constraints.
Strong communication skills and comfort working in customer-facing or cross-functional environments.

Nice-to-haves:

Hands-on experience building AI agents using modern generative AI stacks (OpenAI APIs, commercial or open-source LLMs).
Experience with agent frameworks, orchestration layers, or workflow systems (e.g., tool calling, planners, multi-agent setups).
Familiarity with evaluation, monitoring, and observability for LLM-powered systems in production.
Experience deploying ML systems in cloud environments and operating them at scale.
Experience fine-tuning or adapting foundation models using methods like supervised fine-tuning (SFT), reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR), and low-rank adaptation (LoRA) to improve agent performance on domain-specific tasks.
Interest in shaping the future of general-purpose enterprise agents and their real-world impact.

Compensation packages at Scale for eligible roles include base salary, equity, and benefits. The range displayed on each job posting reflects the minimum and maximum target for new hire salaries for the position and may be inclusive of several career levels at Scale; it will be determined during the interview process based on work location and additional factors, including job-related skills, experience, qualifications, interview performance, and relevant education or training. Scale employees in eligible roles are also granted equity based compensation, subject to Board of Director approval. Your recruiter can share more about the specific salary range for your preferred location during the hiring process, and confirm whether the hired role will be eligible for equity grant. You'll also receive benefits including, but not limited to: comprehensive health, dental and vision coverage, retirement benefits, a learning and development stipend, and generous PTO. Additionally, this role may be eligible for additional benefits such as a commuter stipend.

Please reference the job posting's subtitle for where this position will be located. For pay transparency purposes, the base salary range for this full-time position in the locations of San Francisco, New York, Seattle is:

$264,800—$331,000 USD

PLEASE NOTE: Our policy requires a 90-day waiting period before reconsidering candidates for the same role. This allows us to ensure a fair and thorough evaluation of all applicants.

About Us:

At Scale, our mission is to develop reliable AI systems for the world's most important decisions. Our products provide the high-quality data and full-stack technologies that power the world's leading models, and help enterprises and governments build, deploy, and oversee AI applications that deliver real impact. We work closely with industry leaders like Meta, Ernst & Young, Mayo Clinic, Time Inc., the Government of Qatar, and U.S. government agencies including the Army and Air Force. We are expanding our team to accelerate the development of AI applications.

We believe that everyone should be able to bring their whole selves to work, which is why we are proud to be an inclusive and equal opportunity workplace. We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability status, gender identity or Veteran status.

We are committed to working with and providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with physical and mental disabilities. If you need assistance and/or a reasonable accommodation in the application or recruiting process due to a disability, please contact us at accommodations@scale.com. Please see the United States Department of Labor's Know Your Rights poster for additional information.

We comply with the United States Department of Labor's Pay Transparency provision.

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