Principal Machine Learning Engineer

Level AI; Mountain View (CA); On-site; USD 230,000 - 360,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive compensation

Meaningful equity

Comprehensive benefits

Job summary

Level AI, a Mountain View-based conversational intelligence company, is seeking a Principal AI Research Engineer to set the technical direction for our most ambitious AI initiatives. You will lead research on LLMs, speech understanding, and retrieval systems—then translate that research into production capabilities at scale.

This is a senior individual-contributor role for someone who thrives at the intersection of cutting-edge research and real-world deployment, and who can raise the technical

Qualifications

• Advanced degree or equivalent experience in ML/AI required.
• Experience applying ML/AI in production at scale.
• Strong track record of shipping research into production.

Responsibilities

• Define and drive the research roadmap for core AI capabilities spanning LLMs, ASR/speech understanding, retrieval-augmented generation, and agentic systems.
• Design, train, fine-tune, and evaluate state-of-the-art models from prototype to production-grade systems.
• Lead scalable training and inference pipelines for real customer-scale data.
• Establish rigorous evaluation frameworks, benchmarks, and quality bars for model performance, safety, and reliability.
• Partner with product, platform, and ML engineering teams to ship research into customer-facing features.
• Mentor senior and mid-level engineers, set technical standards, and influence across teams.
• Stay ahead of the field, evaluate new techniques, and represent Level AI's technical work externally.

Skills

Python

Deep learning

LLMs / transformers

System design

Mentorship

Communication

Education

Degree in CS/ML or related field

Tools

PyTorch

TensorFlow

Distributed training

Job description

Level AI is a Mountain View-based conversational intelligence company building the AI platform that powers modern contact centers. Our systems analyze millions of customer interactions to surface insights, automate quality assurance, and drive real-time agent guidance. We work at the frontier of applied speech and language AI, and our research directly shapes products used by enterprise customers every day.

We are looking for a Principal AI Research Engineer to set the technical direction for our most ambitious AI initiatives. You will lead research on large language models, speech understanding, and retrieval systems—then translate that research into production capabilities at scale. This is a senior individual-contributor role for someone who thrives at the intersection of cutting-edge research and real-world deployment, and who can raise the technical bar across the entire AI organization.

What You’ll Do

• Define and drive the research roadmap for core AI capabilities spanning LLMs, ASR/speech understanding, retrieval-augmented generation, and agentic systems.

• Design, train, fine-tune, and evaluate state-of-the-art models, taking them from prototype to robust, production-grade systems.

• Lead the architecture of scalable training and inference pipelines that operate reliably on real customer-scale data.

• Establish rigorous evaluation frameworks, benchmarks, and quality bars for model performance, safety, and reliability.

• Partner closely with product, platform, and ML engineering teams to ship research into customer-facing features.

• Mentor senior and mid-level engineers, set technical standards, and act as a force multiplier across the AI org.

• Stay ahead of the field, evaluate emerging techniques, and represent Level AI's technical work externally where appropriate.

What You’ll Bring

• Degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or a related field, or equivalent research experience; typically 7+ years applying ML/AI in production settings.

• Deep expertise in modern deep learning, with strong command of LLMs, transformers, and at least one of speech/ASR, NLP, information retrieval, or multimodal modeling.

• A track record of taking research from idea to deployed, scaled product—not just publications, but shipped impact.

• Expert-level proficiency in Python and a major deep learning framework (PyTorch preferred), with strong software engineering fundamentals.

• Hands-on experience training and serving large models, including distributed training, optimization, and efficient inference.

• Demonstrated technical leadership: setting direction, mentoring engineers, and influencing across teams.

• Clear communicator able to convey complex technical ideas to both research and product audiences.

Nice to Have

• Experience in conversational AI, contact center, or speech analytics domains.

• Publications at top-tier venues (NeurIPS, ICML, ACL, EMNLP, Interspeech) or significant open-source contributions.

• Experience with agentic frameworks, tool use, and orchestration of LLM-based systems.

• Familiarity with model safety, alignment, and responsible AI evaluation.

Why Level AI

• Work on AI problems that ship to real enterprise customers at scale, with measurable impact.

• Join a small, high-caliber team where your technical decisions shape the product and the org.

• Competitive compensation, meaningful equity, and comprehensive benefits.

• A culture that values research depth and pragmatic, production-focused execution in equal measure.

Level AI is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees.