Remote ML Lead Engineer - Build Production-Grade Systems

Next Step Systems; United States; Remote; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical insurance

Dental and Vision

PTO

Job summary

Next Step Systems is seeking a Machine Learning Lead Engineer who owns the execution layer of our intelligence, turning research and model capabilities into reliable, scalable production systems. You will work across the model lifecycle—from data and training to evaluation, inference, and deployment.

This hands-on leadership role blends research, systems, and product, requiring strong ML experience and a track record building production ML workflows.

Qualifications

• ML experience is required.
• Experience building and shipping ML systems in production.
• Strong understanding of large-model training, fine-tuning, evaluation, and inference.
• Strong software engineering and systems fundamentals.
• Experience operating ML workloads at meaningful scale, especially GPU-based systems.
• Good technical judgment and ability to navigate ambiguous problems independently.
• Bias toward experimentation, measurement, and shipping.
• High standards for correctness, reliability, and production quality.

Responsibilities

• Own the end-to-end ML systems powering the company from data to deployment.
• Build and evolve training and fine-tuning pipelines for large models.
• Design evaluation systems measuring capability, robustness, safety, and real-world performance.
• Architect high-performance inference systems optimizing latency, GPU utilization, memory, cost, and reliability.
• Build data pipelines and systems for high-quality real-world and synthetic training data.
• Establish reliable production infrastructure for deploying, monitoring, and improving models.
• Partner with research and engineering to translate model capabilities into product improvements.
• Make pragmatic technical trade-offs and iterate based on real-world performance.
• Ensure production ML workloads translate into value with measurable targets.
• Keep ML pipelines, training loops, and inference systems stable and maintainable.
• Detect, debug, and resolve production issues quickly to minimize user impact.
• Support and align team members to deliver high-impact ML work with minimal friction.
• Iterate on models and systems to improve user experience over time.

Skills

Machine Learning

Python

GPU-based training

Software engineering

System design

Tools

PyTorch

JAX

Job description

Next Step Systems is seeking a Machine Learning Lead Engineer who owns the execution layer of our intelligence, turning research and model capabilities into reliable, scalable production systems. You will work across the model lifecycle—from data and training to evaluation, inference, and deployment.

This hands-on leadership role blends research, systems, and product, requiring strong ML experience and a track record building production ML workflows.