Lila Sciences
Senior / Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Applied AI
$180K–$298K
Cambridge, MA USA +3 · Staff · Full-time · Posted Oct 7, 2026
- Location
- Cambridge, MA USA
San Francisco, CA USA
Alewife, Cambridge, MA
San Francisco, CA - Experience
- Minimum 1–2 years of hands-on post-training experience and evaluation system design.
About the job
Adapts and evaluates Lila’s AI models for customer-specific scientific workflows, improving model behavior and integrating reliable capabilities into products.
What you'll do
- Run post-training and evaluation cycles to align model behavior with customer requirements and feedback.
- Use customer learnings, data, traces, and evaluation results to diagnose failures and drive model improvements.
- Partner with AI research and software teams to translate model advances into reliable product workflows.
What they ask for
- Hands-on post-training experience with SFT and RL methods such as DPO/PPO/GRPO, plus evaluation system design.
- Strong software engineering skills in Python and modern ML frameworks such as PyTorch.
- Ability to debug ambiguous, high-stakes model behavior using data, traces, logs, and qualitative feedback.
- Deep familiarity with large language models, multimodal 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 architectures.
Pay
$180,000 — $298,000 USD (base salary)
Tools
Python, PyTorch, SFT, RL, DPO, PPO/GRPO
AI focus
Post-training and evaluating AI models, including SFT and reinforcement learning, to adapt model behavior to scientific customer workflows.
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative