Lead ML Engineer, Conversational AI & Real-World Deployment

Sandbar; New York (NY); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Sandbar, an interface company in New York City, is seeking a Lead ML Engineer to build Stream, a private voice ring and conversational interface. You will architect, deploy, and optimize a new multimodal, agentic interface with strong emphasis on real-world ML deployment and human-in-the-loop systems.

You will lead technical direction, collaborate with ML/AI engineers, infrastructure, and design teams, and drive end-to-end model development from research to production at scale.

Qualifications

• 6+ years of post-graduate machine learning experience.
• Experience shipping ML-based products is required.
• Experience in large-language model evaluation and post-training is required.
• Audio/voice ML experience is a plus.
• Comfortable writing production-grade software.
• Passion for human-computer interaction.
• Experience setting technical direction and driving execution with multidisciplinary teams.

Responsibilities

• Lead architecture, strategy, and tradeoffs for ML-based products.
• Design and improve user-facing model-based experiences, incl. agentic control, conversational interactions, and information retrieval.
• Develop infrastructure to rapidly develop, evaluate, and deploy models.
• Optimize inference pipelines for latency, reliability, and concurrency.
• Collaborate with ML/AI engineers, infra, design, and cofounders on current and future products.

Skills

Senior ML leadership

ML-based product shipping

LLM evaluation & post-training

Audio/voice ML (plus)

Production-grade software

Human-computer interaction

Technical direction & execution

Job description

Sandbar, an interface company in New York City, is seeking a Lead ML Engineer to build Stream, a private voice ring and conversational interface. You will architect, deploy, and optimize a new multimodal, agentic interface with strong emphasis on real-world ML deployment and human-in-the-loop systems.

You will lead technical direction, collaborate with ML/AI engineers, infrastructure, and design teams, and drive end-to-end model development from research to production at scale.