Machine Learning; ML Engineer

Job Responsibilities

• Design, prototype, research and build AI systems for Vectara.
• Train, evaluate and deploy ML models in the domains of Natural Language Processing, Information Retrieval, AI Agents, Large Language Models (LLMs) and Multimodal Large Language Model (MMLLMs).
• Improve the quality of Vectara’s AI Agents and RAG-as-a-service platform, working on features like multilinguality, self‑supervised learning, agentic behavior and hallucination reduction.
• Publish technical blogs, papers, and patents.

• BS/MS in Computer Science, Statistics, Electrical/Computer Engineering, Mathematics, or a related field.
• 5+/4+ years of professional work experience after BS/MS applying machine learning to real‑world problems, and crafting scalable and effective ML/AI solutions.
• Strong domain knowledge in at least one of the following: RAG, LLM, information retrieval, Multimodal LLMs.
• Excellent programming skills in Python. Proficiency in data/ML libraries such as pandas, transformers, and torch.
• Familiarity with the technical details of deep learning concepts, such as Transformers, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), mixture of experts (MoE).
• Hands‑on experience in training ML systems end‑to‑end from data curation to evaluation and deployment.

• PhD in Computer Science/Engineering with 1+ years of industry experience.
• Publications in prestigious venues such as ACL, NAACL, EMNLP, NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR as a key author.
• Experience as an ML engineer in an early‑stage, high‑growth environment.
• Expertise in the following areas:
  • Embedding models, rerankers
  • Multimodal retrieval, question answering, and reasoning
  • Vector databases, BM25
  • Planning and reasoning in LLMs
  • Multilinguality in LLMs
  • NLG Evaluation such as hallucination detection

We support remote applicants from all over the US but candidates who can come to the office 2‑3 days a week in our Palo Alto office are preferred.

Salary is just one component of Vectara’s employee compensation. Our full‑time employees are also equity owners in the company, which can have positive impacts on long‑term total compensation for each participating employee.

Vectara welcomes all. We value the collective wisdom of people from different backgrounds, experiences, abilities and perspectives. We never discriminate on the basis of race, religion, national origin, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, age, or marital, veteran, or disability status.

100% paid Medical, Dental, Vision begins on your first day! Option of Health Savings Account (HSA) or Flexible Savings Account (FSA). Generous paid time off (PTO) plus paid sick time, holidays, and company rest days. Professional development and training opportunities. Company virtual happy hours and fun team building activities and more.