AI/ML Engineer — Reinforcement Learning in Manufacturing

Applied Materials, Inc.; Santa Clara (CA); On-site; USD 184,000 - 253,000; Full time

Job summary

Applied Materials in Santa Clara, CA is seeking an AI/ML Engineer to design, develop, and deploy production ML solutions across machine learning, deep learning, reinforcement learning, and AI agents. A key focus is using reinforcement learning to optimize manufacturing decisions such as scheduling, planning, and resource allocation within simulation environments.

You will work with data scientists, software engineers, and cloud architects to build scalable training, inference, monitoring, and

Qualifications

• Strong foundation in machine learning and deep learning.
• Hands-on experience building and deploying production ML systems.
• Strong Python development skills.
• Experience with PyTorch and/or TensorFlow.
• Demonstrated experience developing reinforcement learning solutions.
• Strong understanding of RL concepts including environments, policies, rewards, value functions, and exploration strategies.
• Experience with modern RL methods such as PPO, SAC, DQN, Actor-Critic, or similar approaches.
• Experience training and evaluating RL agents in simulation environments.
• Ability to formulate complex optimization problems as reinforcement learning problems.
• Experience with Git, testing, code reviews, CI/CD, and production software development.

Responsibilities

• Design, train, evaluate, and deploy machine learning and deep learning models.
• Develop reinforcement learning solutions for complex decision-making and optimization problems.
• Build RL environments, reward functions, policies, and evaluation frameworks.
• Train and optimize agents using simulation and operational data.
• Explore techniques including policy optimization, model-based RL, multi-agent systems, and hierarchical learning.
• Build scalable training, inference, monitoring, and retraining workflows.
• Partner with software engineers to integrate AI capabilities into production and customer-facing products.
• Contribute to MLOps, experiment tracking, model versioning, observability, and lifecycle management.
• Research and prototype emerging technologies including Generative AI, Agentic AI, LLMs, RAG, and multi-agent systems.
• Collaborate with data scientists, software engineers, cloud architects, and semiconductor domain experts.

Skills

Machine learning

Deep learning

Python

PyTorch

TensorFlow

Reinforcement learning

RL environments

MLOps

Git CI/CD

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

MLflow

Azure

AWS

Google Cloud

Job description

Applied Materials in Santa Clara, CA is seeking an AI/ML Engineer to design, develop, and deploy production ML solutions across machine learning, deep learning, reinforcement learning, and AI agents. A key focus is using reinforcement learning to optimize manufacturing decisions such as scheduling, planning, and resource allocation within simulation environments.

You will work with data scientists, software engineers, and cloud architects to build scalable training, inference, monitoring, and