Lila Sciences
Principal Machine Learning Engineer, Applied AI
$252K–$336K
Cambridge, MA USA +3 · Principal · Full-time · Posted Oct 7, 2026
- Location
- Cambridge, MA USA
San Francisco, CA USA
Alewife, Cambridge, MA
San Francisco, CA - Experience
- Minimum 2-3 years of hands-on post-training and evaluation system design experience.
About the job
Leads post-training, evaluation, and production integration of AI models to adapt them to customer-specific scientific workflows.
What you'll do
- Lead model post-training and build evaluation loops to improve behavior, reliability, and customer fit.
- Translate customer feedback and model advances into improvements, partnering with research and software teams to integrate capabilities into product workflows.
- Debug model failures and mentor engineers on model adaptation, evaluation, and deployment.
What they ask for
- Hands-on post-training experience, including SFT and RL methods such as DPO/PPO/GRPO, and evaluation system design.
- Strong software engineering skills in Python and modern ML frameworks such as PyTorch.
- Experience leading technical work across research and engineering teams.
- Deep familiarity with large language models, multi-modal models, or agentic AI systems.
Nice to have
- Experience adapting models for customer-facing or production workflows, ideally in scientific, technical, or data-intensive domains.
- Experience with RL post-training, evaluation harnesses, model monitoring, quality dashboards, or MoE training.
Pay
$252,000 — $336,000 USD base salary
Tools
SFT, DPO, PPO/GRPO, Python, PyTorch, RLHF, GRPO
AI focus
Post-train and evaluate AI models, including reinforcement learning approaches, to align model behavior with customer needs and deliver reliable scientific workflows.
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative