Senior AI / Machine Learning Engineer

About the role

As a Senior AI/ML Engineer at Absentia Labs, you will lead the design, training, and deployment of large-scale machine learning models for AI systems that integrate AI, biology, chemistry, and engineering. This role focuses on building and training models that can scale across modalities, tasks, and uncertainty regimes.

Responsibilities

• Design, train, and evaluate large-scale models (LLMs, diffusion models, GNNs).
• Own end-to-end training pipelines (dataset interfaces, batching, distributed training, checkpointing).
• Make decisions on model architecture, objective functions, optimization strategies, and scaling laws.
• Build distributed training systems (data parallelism, model parallelism, sharding, mixed precision).
• Collaborate with data engineers to define ML-ready datasets and streaming interfaces.
• Translate ambiguous scientific/product requirements into ML solutions.
• Drive model evaluation, ablation, and iteration for generalization, stability, and reproducibility.
• Contribute to model serving, inference efficiency, and lifecycle management.
• Provide technical leadership through design reviews and mentorship.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of industry experience in ML or applied AI.
• Proven experience training large-scale models in production.
• Hands-on expertise with LLMs, diffusion models, and/or GNNs.
• Strong proficiency in PyTorch (or equivalent).
• Deep understanding of distributed training and performance optimization.
• Experience with large datasets and high-throughput data pipelines.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals.
• Able to communicate technical trade-offs clearly.

Bonus Skills

• Experience with RL, fine-tuning, or RLHF.
• Model compression, distillation, or inference optimization.
• Prediction systems deployment.
• Multimodal learning or foundation models.
• Startup or fast-paced R&D environment experience.
• Open-source contributions to ML frameworks.

Compensation Range

$115,000 - $200,000