Member of Technical Staff - ML Ops

Vinci; Palo Alto (CA); On-site; USD 185,000 - 245,000; Full time

Job summary

Vinci is seeking an experienced engineer to scale its AI physics platform. You will own the data-generation pipeline, dataset lineage, and the training-launch workflow, driving end-to-end production workloads for millions of simulations and future jobs.

You will work in a small, production-focused team building a scalable, fault-tolerant pipeline with GPU scheduling, distributed execution, and robust data catalogs, while reducing costs and improving traceability.

Qualifications

• 5+ years building production data or ML pipelines.
• Experience running large batch or simulation workloads with thousands of long-running jobs.
• Strong Python and software engineering fundamentals with tested code.
• Comfort with relational and NoSQL databases at scale.

Responsibilities

• Scale the data generation pipeline by orders of magnitude from thousands to millions of simulations.
• Own dataset lineage and reproducibility for completed simulations.
• Build data quality checks: acceptance criteria, bad-sample flagging, coverage and distribution checks.
• Run and extend the GPU-based job platform (Temporal, Ray) for generation, training and validation.
• Launch training jobs (Ray Train, torchrun); manage checkpoints and the model registry.
• Collaborate with infrastructure to ensure compute and data resources meet workloads.
• Make costs visible: analyze per-sample and per-configuration costs to optimize generation.
• Maintain code health with tests, CI, and safe migrations.

Skills

Data/ML pipelines

Large batch workloads

Python & testing

Databases at scale

Workflow orchestration

Cloud storage

Impact measurement

Job description

About Vinci

Every physical thing you touch exists because somebody successfully navigated the laws of physics: the chips in your phone, the vehicles on the road, the data centers powering AI. Physics determines what can be built, how well it performs, and where it breaks. Yet the tools engineers use to understand physical behavior are too slow and too specialized to use continuously while designing, so critical decisions get made with only a partial view of how a system will behave.

About Vinci

Every physical thing you touch exists because somebody successfully navigated the laws of physics: the chips in your phone, the vehicles on the road, the data centers powering AI. Physics determines what can be built, how well it performs, and where it breaks. Yet the tools engineers use to understand physical behavior are too slow and too specialized to use continuously while designing, so critical decisions get made with only a partial view of how a system will behave. Our mission is to make physical reasoning as accessible to engineers as language became through modern AI. This is not an attempt to build slightly better engineering software. It is an attempt to change how physical products are designed. Our technology is used today by many of the world's most advanced semiconductor and electronics organizations, including nearly half of the twenty largest companies in the industry. We are backed by Khosla Ventures and Eclipse Ventures.

The role

Our foundation model learns physics from simulations, and we generate the simulation data ourselves. The simulations encapsulate real-world, validated physical results. Our aim is to create a data corpus covering multiple types of physics over an exhaustive set of physical objects.

Our data corpus is expanding. We currently operate on the petabyte scale, and our data volume is growing rapidly. We are hiring the engineer who makes that possible: the person who owns the pipeline from "here is a generation recipe" to "here is a versioned, validated dataset a training run can consume," and the ML lifecycle around it. Your job is to expand our job scheduling and execution platform to ensure that campaigns of millions of simulations, ML training runs, and future jobs are simple to run, fault-tolerant, and well-cataloged for traceability.

This is hands-on engineering in a production codebase. You will write, test and ship the code yourself.

What You'll Do

• Scale the data generation pipeline by orders of magnitude. Our generation framework runs real simulations on 3D parts, and we are scaling from thousands of simulations to millions.
• Own dataset lineage and reproducibility. Every completed simulation records how it was produced and the recipe how it can be augmented for future data generation jobs.
• Build data quality into the pipeline. Acceptance criteria, bad-sample flagging, coverage and distribution checks against the target parameter space, and per-field statistics on every sample.
• Run the job platform. Our GPU scheduler uses Temporal as a durable control plane and Ray as the execution plane, with priority, admission, cancellation and per-job isolated environments. You will extend it as generation, training and validation compete for the same fleet.
• Close the loop between data and models. You will own training job launch (Ray Train, torchrun), checkpoint management and the model registry, and the path that puts a trained checkpoint back into the pipeline, for example as a warm start for the next generation campaign or as an inference pipeline in production.
• Integrate with the infrastructure team. Our compute is managed by our infrastructure experts, and you will work closely with them to ensure compute and data resources will meet workload needs.
• Make costs visible. Know what a sample costs to generate, store and serve, by physics type and by configuration. Find the stage that wastes GPU time, and make the case for which data is worth generating next.
• Keep the codebase healthy as it grows. Write tests first, keep CI fast, write schema migrations that are safe on populated databases, and document what you build so the next engineer can operate it without you.

What We’re Looking For

• 5+ years building production data or ML pipelines, including at least 2 years where you owned a pipeline that ran on GPUs at meaningful scale
• Experience running large batch or simulation workloads: thousands of long-running jobs, partial failures, retries, preemption, and making sure work is neither lost nor duplicated
• Strong Python and software engineering fundamentals: clean abstractions, typed code, and a test suite you trust
• Comfort with relationalrelationa and NoSQLl databases at scale: schema design, migrations on live data, bulk writes, and query performance once tables reach hundreds of millions of rows
• Experience with workflow orchestration or distributed execution frameworks, such as Temporal, Ray, Airflow, Argo, Kubernetes Jobs or Slurm
• Working knowledge of cloud object storage and of the file formats that feed training at high throughput
• You measure your work by what it lets other people do: experiments run, data generated, failures caught early

Nice to have

• PyTorch distributed training (DDP, FSDP, torchrun, Ray Train), checkpointing, and experiment tracking
• MPI, CUDA or HIP, or experience operating numerical solvers in production
• Infrastructure as code (Terraform, Ansible) and private networking for multi-environment deployments
• Scientific or simulation data: CFD, FEA, EDA, CAD, or other large numerical or geometric datasets
• Designing parameter sampling or curriculum strategies for training-data coverage
• Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, or similar observability stacks

Is this you?

This role sits at the point where physics simulation turns into an AI model that understands physics. You do not need to be a physicist or a model researcher, but you should want to understand both well enough to build the system that connects them. If you have been the person who knew why last night's batch failed, what it cost, and how to make sure it does not happen again, this is likely a good fit.

We are a small team with a production codebase and a very large data target. Much of what an ML platform team would give you at a larger company does not exist here yet. Building it is the job.

Why Join Us

• Real impact, now. Vinci is already deployed on production programs at leading semiconductor companies. The work you do this week shows up in real hardware, not a demo.
• A hard, unsolved problem. Help change when and how physics enters hardware design, at the intersection of AI, first-principles physics, and high-stakes enterprise engineering.
• Exceptional people. Work alongside world-class engineers and researchers, some of the best you’ll encounter at what they do.
• Speed and ownership. We ship fast, decisions don’t wait for committees, and your input directly shapes the product and the company.

Compensation Range: $185K - $245K