Staff/Senior Machine Learning Research Engineer, Intelligent Systems

About Scale

Scale’s mission is to develop reliable AI systems for the world’s most important decisions. As the leading AI data foundry, we provide the high-quality data and full-stack technologies that power the world’s most advanced models - fueling breakthroughs in generative AI, defense, and autonomous vehicles. We partner with leading enterprises and governments to bring AI into production that performs when it matters most, combining rigorous evaluation with full-stack deployment so our customers can build AI they can trust.

About the Team

Applied Intelligence Systems team is part of the Scale Generative AI Platform (SGP), focused on pushing the frontier of what agentic applications can do across diverse enterprise and government use cases. We build the infrastructure and tooling that power agentic AI in production, paired with applied ML research, design, and evaluation to ensure these systems perform reliably at the scale our customers demand. We’re growing fast, with increasing traction across both commercial and public sector customers, and we’re just getting started - this team will define what dependable, production-grade agentic AI looks like.

About the Role

As a Machine Learning Engineer on Agent Oversight, you will drive the end-to-end lifecycle that ensures our production agents perform reliably and improve over time. This includes building observability tools, designing robust evaluation frameworks, and developing improvement loops. Whether scaling infrastructure or researching new improvement methods, you will navigate the entire ML loop while maintaining rigorous technical standards.

You will:

• Build or contribute to observability into agent behavior in production - the signals and instrumentation needed to actually see what an agent is doing, not just whether it succeeded or failed
• Design evaluation methodologies and metrics for agentic applications, and work with the platform to make them run automatically, at scale, across different customer use cases, not just as one-off analyses
• Build, ship, and own ML systems that detect drift, anomalies, or misalignment in production agent behavior - from first prototype through running reliably at scale
• Design and run rigorous experiments to validate model and agent performance improvements before they ship
• Work alongside software engineers on the platform where your work intersects with broader infrastructure - but you’re expected to take your own work from idea to production, not hand it off
• Collaborate closely with product managers, customers, data annotators, Forward Deployed Engineers, and other engineering teams to translate enterprise and government requirements into robust platform capabilities
• Depending on focus, contribute to novel methods and approaches that push the state of the art for agent evaluation and improvement, or focus on building ML systems that hold up reliably at scale in production

Requirements:

• 5+ years of experience as an ML engineer or applied scientist, ideally on a production ML or LLM-powered system - not just consuming a third-party ML API within a feature
• Strong grounding in at least two of the following:
• Building or scaling evaluation, monitoring, or continuous-learning infrastructure for ML/agentic systems
• Design experience for agent systems (architecture, orchestration, tool use)
• Developing new methods, reward models, or model training/fine-tuning approaches

Nice to have:

• Experience building or contributing to RLHF, SFT, or other fine-tuning/RL workflows, reward modeling, or verifiable-reward systems
• Experience with model or systems optimization (e.g., latency, cost, or inference efficiency)
• Published research, open-source contributions, or patents in agentic systems, LLMs, or applied ML
• Experience working in regulated or enterprise contexts
• Track record of taking a novel method from prototype to something running reliably in production, navigating ambiguity along the way
• Experience reviewing others’ technical designs or mentoring engineers at a senior/staff level

Compensation packages at Scale for eligible roles include base salary, equity, and benefits. The range displayed on each job posting reflects the minimum and maximum target for new hire salaries for the position and may be inclusive of several career levels at Scale; it will be determined during the interview process based on work location and additional factors, including job-related skills, experience, qualifications, interview performance, and relevant education or training. Scale employees in eligible roles are also granted equity based compensation, subject to Board of Director approval. Your recruiter can share more about the specific salary range for your preferred location during the hiring process, and confirm whether the hired role will be eligible for equity grant. You'll also receive benefits including, but not limited to: comprehensive health, dental and vision coverage, retirement benefits, a learning and development stipend, and generous PTO. Additionally, this role may be eligible for additional benefits such as a commuter stipend.

Please reference the job posting's subtitle for where this position will be located. For pay transparency purposes, the base salary range for this full-time position in the locations of San Francisco, New York, Seattle is:$216,000-$270,000 USD

PLEASE NOTE: Our policy requires a 90-day waiting period before reconsidering candidates for the same role. This allows us to ensure a fair and thorough evaluation of all applicants.

About Us:

At Scale, our mission is to develop reliable AI systems for the world's most important decisions. Our products provide the high-quality data and full-stack technologies that power the world's leading models, and help enterprises and governments build, deploy, and oversee AI applications that deliver real impact. We work closely with industry leaders like Meta, Ernst & Young, Mayo Clinic, Time Inc., the Government of Qatar, and U.S. government agencies including the Army and Air Force. We are expanding our team to accelerate the development of AI applications.

We believe that everyone should be able to bring their whole selves to work, which is why we are proud to be an inclusive and equal opportunity workplace. We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability status, gender identity or Veteran status.

We are committed to working with and providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with physical and mental disabilities. If you need assistance and/or a reasonable accommodation in the application or recruiting process due to a disability, please contact us at accommodations@scale.com. Please see the United States Department of Labor's Know Your Rights poster for additional information.

We comply with the United States Department of Labor's Pay Transparency provision.

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