Machine Learning Research Engineer Software Mountain View, California Posted

# Machine Learning Research Engineer Software company
* Location Mountain View, California
* Type Full-time
* Posted
20 October 2026

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The role, as published## About the company

Our client is a software company.## The role Raydar is recruiting for this role on behalf of our client. Drive applied machine learning research on language models, moving from an initial question through experimentation to a model ready for real-world use. This is an early technical position with close collaboration alongside company leadership, engineers and clients.## What you'll do
* Convert client workflows and observed model shortcomings into focused research questions, evaluation suites and experiments.
* ** Create training datasets**, reward functions and automated checkers, and run fine-tuning, preference-based and reinforcement learning experiments.
* Investigate failed training runs and rely on ablation studies and held-out testing to learn which changes truly raise quality.
* ** Lead projects from start to finish**, ending with a deployed model or a publishable result.
* Collaborate with fellow researchers and infrastructure engineers to ship successful models and study how they behave live.## What we're looking for
* Significant practical background in adapting language models after pretraining, with personal accountability for experiments and their outcomes.
* A track record where your modeling work reached real use or outside review, whether through a shipped product, a widely adopted open model, or an accepted paper.
* Published research or open-source machine learning contributions in this area.
* Prior experience at an organization operating at the leading edge of AI.
* Strong Python and PyTorch skills, including writing and debugging training code on your own.
* Good analytical judgment, with the ability to explain why a method succeeded and where a metric gave a false signal.
* Confidence working through ambiguous technical problems and speaking directly with clients and colleagues.## Bonus points
* Experience mentoring more junior engineers or researchers.
* Master's or PhD in Computer Science.
* Background in areas such as long-horizon reinforcement learning, model compression, generated training data, reward design or large-scale distributed training.## Location and work model
* Mountain View, CA, United States
* On-site, 5 days a week in the office
* Full-time## Compensation, as the posting describes it
* Equity Pay $200k to $350kUSD base a year