Principal Machine Learning Engineer

European Recruitment BV; United States; On-site; USD 180,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

European Recruitment BV seeks a Principal Machine Learning Engineer to act as a deep technical authority designing and evolving the company’s most critical ML systems.

You will work across training, inference, evaluation, and infrastructure, solving architectural and performance challenges, setting standards, and shaping ML systems across the organization. This is a hands-on, high-impact role focused on depth.

Qualifications

• Proven experience with deep learning and transformer architectures in production.
• Hands-on experience training, fine-tuning, or deploying large-scale ML models.
• Proficiency with PyTorch or JAX and ability to learn others quickly.
• Experience with distributed training and inference frameworks (e.g. DeepSpeed, FSDP, Megatron, Ray).
• Strong software engineering fundamentals and production-grade systems.
• Experience with GPU optimization, memory efficiency, quantization, and mixed precision.
• Comfort owning end-to-end ML systems in production from data to deployment.
• Bias toward shipping, learning fast, and iterative improvement.

Responsibilities

• Architect and build large-scale ML systems spanning data, training, evaluation, inference, and deployment.
• Design reproducible, high-performance training pipelines across GPU infrastructure.
• Architect inference systems balancing latency, throughput, cost, and reliability at scale.
• Design and maintain data systems for high-quality synthetic and real-world training data.
• Implement evaluation pipelines covering performance, robustness, safety, and bias.

Skills

Deep learning

Transformer models

PyTorch

JAX

Distributed training

GPU optimization

Production code

Latency optimization

Tools

DeepSpeed

FSDP

Megatron

Ray

Job description

Role

As a Principal Machine Learning Engineer, you are a deep technical authority responsible for designing and evolving the most critical ML systems in the company.

You operate across training, inference, evaluation, and infrastructure, solving the hardest architectural and performance problems. While Technical Leads may own execution at the team level, you set the technical standard and shape how ML systems are built across the organization.

This is a hands‑on, high‑impact role focused on depth.

Focus

• Architect and build large-scale ML systems spanning data, training, evaluation, inference, and deployment.
• Design reproducible, high‑performance training pipelines across GPU infrastructure.
• Architect inference systems that balance latency, throughput, cost, and reliability at scale.
• Design and maintain data systems for high-quality synthetic and real‑world training data.
• Implement evaluation pipelines covering performance, robustness, safety, and bias, in partnership with research leadership.
• Own production deployment, including GPU optimization, memory efficiency, latency reduction, and scaling policies.
• Collaborate closely with application engineering to integrate ML systems cleanly into backend, mobile, and desktop products.
• Make pragmatic trade‑offs and ship improvements quickly, learning from real usage.
• Work under real production constraints: latency, cost, reliability, and safety

Requirements

• Strong background in deep learning and transformer‑based architectures.
• Hands‑on experience training, fine‑tuning, or deploying large‑scale ML models in production.
• Proficiency with at least one modern ML framework (e.g. PyTorch, JAX), and ability to learn others quickly.
• Experience with distributed training and inference frameworks (e.g. DeepSpeed, FSDP, Megatron, ZeRO, Ray).
• Strong software engineering fundamentals – you write robust, maintainable, production‑grade systems.
• Experience with GPU optimization, including memory efficiency, quantization, and mixed precision.
• Comfort owning ambiguous, zero‑to‑one ML systems end‑to‑end.
• A bias toward shipping, learning fast, and improving systems through iteration.

Ideal Experience

• Experience with LLM inference frameworks such as vLLM, TensorRT‑LLM, or FasterTransformer.
• Contributions to open‑source ML or systems libraries.
• Background in scientific computing, compilers, or GPU kernels.
• Experience with RLHF pipelines (PPO, DPO, ORPO).
• Experience training or deploying multimodal or diffusion models.
• Experience with large‑scale data processing (Apache Arrow, Spark, Ray).

Outcomes

• ML systems (training, inference, evaluation) are reliable, scalable, and meet defined performance targets.
• Models deployed to production achieve measurable quality improvements and meet user‑impact goals.
• Production issues are proactively monitored, debugged, and resolved with clear root‑cause analysis.
• Team and cross‑functional collaborators benefit from clear guidance, best practices, and scalable ML solutions.
• Research‑to‑production cycles are efficient, safe, and continuously improve the product experience.