Applied ML Engineer

Taste Labs; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 100,000 - 130,000; Full time

Job summary

Taste Labs is seeking a full-stack ML engineer to lead data and evaluation processes in the creative AI field. You will own projects that focus on developing models and conducting experiments to enhance taste-based AI outputs.

The ideal candidate is creative and has experience in post-training evaluations. Your role involves training models, collaborating with AI labs, and publishing findings. If you are passionate about taste and cutting-edge AI, this is the opportunity for you!

Qualifications

• Experience in training reward models, classifiers, judges, and verifiers.
• Ability to develop evaluations and benchmarks for subjective domains.
• Familiarity with open-source models and post-training techniques.

Responsibilities

• Own full-stack ML experiments and training runs.
• Develop internal research and evaluation design.
• Set up infrastructure for experiments.

Skills

Post-training experience

LLM experience

Collaboration with AI labs

Creative thinking

Ambiguity management

Job description

About the company

Taste Labs is building the data and infrastructure layer for taste. Our goal is to end AI slop. To make AI feel right, not just be correct. We raised $18.5M in seed co‑led by Amplify and CRV, and most frontier labs are already customers.

AI has nailed objective domains and can generate anything. The hard part left is judgement: what fits, what feels like you, what's actually GREAT. We're turning that into something measurable, starting with design.

We do it on two sides: building the post‑training data and RL environments that teach taste to frontier models, and the context and verification tools agents need to produce work that's more creative, more on‑brand, more right.

If that problem excites you, you'll like it here!

About the role

You’ll own full‑stack ML experiments, training runs, infra, data and eval pipelines, and publishing results. You’ll develop Taste’s internal research, evaluation design, judges and reward models while collaborating directly with AI labs on frontier projects.

What You'll Do

• Train reward models, classifiers, judges, and verifiers for subjective domains (e.g. design, writing, visual style).
• Develop frontier evaluations and benchmarks for subjective domains.
• Run post‑training experiments on open‑source models to test new data formats and post‑training techniques.
• Set up the infrastructure to run this.
• Collaborate with AI labs and creative experts to design pilots and experiments around taste.
• Own the end‑to‑end pipeline.
• Publish blogs and whitepapers.

You Might Be a Good Fit If You

• Are obsessed with taste and want a world with less AI slop.
• Have experience in post‑training and in evals/judges.
• Have LLM experience; cannot be purely classical ML.
• Think like a researcher, move like an engineer. Creative, scrappy, comfortable in ambiguity.
• Have startup experience strongly preferred; deep passion for creativity and design.