Forward Deployed Engineer - LLM Post-training

reflectionai; San Francisco, New York (CA, NY); On-site; USD 150,000 - 230,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Top-tier compensation

Stock options

Health & wellness coverage

Meals provided in office

Parental leave (22 weeks)

Job summary

Reflection AI is seeking an ML Engineer to drive fine-tuning of open-weight language models for enterprise customers. You will prepare data, configure training, and evaluate progress while collaborating with research teams to push capabilities forward.

You will build evaluation suites, maintain data pipelines, and support end-to-end deployments across cloud, VPC, and on‑prem environments. Strong Python and ML infra skills are essential.

Qualifications

• Applied ML experience with fine-tuning language models.
• Experience with SFT/DPO/RLHF or similar techniques.
• 3+ years of engineering experience in ML or ML engineering.
• Strong Python software engineering and data pipelines.
• Customer-facing experience is a plus.

Responsibilities

• Fine-tune open-weight models for customer-specific use cases and datasets.
• Build and maintain evaluation infrastructure and baselines.
• Prepare training data from raw customer inputs and ensure data quality.
• Debug and diagnose training/inference issues across pipelines and deployments.
• Support end-to-end deployments across hybrid environments (cloud, VPC, on-prem).
• Contribute to playbooks and evaluation benchmarks for the team.

Skills

Applied ML

Fine-tuning

Python

Data pipelines

Evaluation design

Education

BS/MS in CS or related

Tools

PyTorch

TensorFlow

Hugging Face

Weights & Biases

Job description

Our Mission

Reflection is a research lab making intelligence open and accessible for everyone to use, customize, and build on. We build open models that let anyone control their intelligence and help shape the future of AI. Our mission: make intelligence open and accessible to all.

Role Overview
We’re looking for a core member of Reflection’s Applied AI team to drive model fine‑tuning and evaluations for enterprise customers. This team takes Reflection’s open-weight models and adapts them for specific customer domains, tasks, and constraints. As a ML Engineer, you will work hands‑on with customer data, run fine‑tuning workflows, build evaluation harnesses, and deploy adapted models to production. You’ll work directly with customers to understand what they need and with research teams to push what’s possible.

What You’ll Do

• Fine‑tune Reflection’s open-weight models for customer‑specific use cases: prepare datasets, configure training runs (SFT, preference optimization, reinforcement fine‑tuning), and iterate based on evals.

• Build and maintain evaluation infrastructure: design eval suites, curate test sets, establish baselines, and measure whether fine‑tuned models actually improve on the tasks customers care about.

• Prepare training data from raw customer inputs: inspect data quality, clean and format datasets, identify adversarial or noisy samples, and build reproducible data pipelines.

• Debug and diagnose training and inference issues: interpret loss curves, catch data quality problems, and identify when training dynamics indicate something is wrong.

• Support end‑to‑end deployments of fine‑tuned models across hybrid environments (public cloud, VPC, and on‑premises), helping ensure inference performance and reliability in production.

• Contribute to evolving playbooks, evaluation benchmarks, and best practices as part of a growing fine‑tuning and evals practice.

What We’re Looking For

• Applied ML experience with hands‑on fine‑tuning of language models. You have prepared datasets, run training loops, evaluated results, and shipped a fine‑tuned model. Familiarity with SFT, DPO, RLHF, or similar techniques.

• Understanding of evaluation methodology: how to design evals, interpret training graphs, and tell whether a model is actually better or just overfitting to the benchmark.

• Comfort with training infrastructure: GPUs, compute management, debugging common training failures. You don’t need to be an infra engineer, but you should not be afraid of a stack trace from a training loop.

• Strong software engineering fundamentals (Python). You write clean, reproducible code. Experience with data pipelines and version control for datasets and experiments.

• 3+ years of engineering experience with meaningful exposure to applied ML or ML engineering (e.g., MLE, Applied Scientist, Data Scientist who shipped models to production, or ML‑focused SWE).

• Demonstrated ability and interest to work in customer‑facing environments, understanding user needs and translating domain requirements into training strategies.

• Self‑starter with high agency and ownership, excelling in fast‑paced startup environments where playbooks are still being written.

What We Offer:

We believe that to make intelligence open and accessible to all, you need to start at the foundation. Joining Reflection means building from the ground up as part of a talent‑dense team. You will help define our future as a company, and help define the future of open foundational models.

We want you to do the most impactful work of your career with the confidence that you and the people you care about most are supported.

• Top‑tier compensation: Salary and equity structured to recognize and retain our talent globally.

• Stock options: Everyone who joins and contributes to Reflection’s success gets to share in the upside through stock options.

• Health & wellness: Comprehensive medical, dental, vision, and life, with an annual wellness allowance.

• Meals: Lunch and dinner are provided in the office daily.

• Life & family: 22 weeks paid parental leave for all new birthing and non‑birthing parents, including adoptive and surrogate journeys.

• Vacation days: Unlimited paid time off in the U.S. and 30 days in the U.K.

• Sponsorship support: We sponsor visas to help exceptional talent join our team and support long‑term immigration pathways where applicable.

• Team building: We have regular off‑sites, happy hours, and team celebrations.

Export Control Notice: This position may require access to technology or source code subject to the U.S. Export Administration Regulations. Any offer of employment for this role may be conditioned on the Company's ability to provide the candidate with access to such technology or source code in compliance with applicable US export control laws, which may require the Company to seek government authorization.