Remote Staff ML Engineer — AI Systems Leader

Primer; Pasadena (CA); Remote; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Full medical, dental, vision coverage

Remote work stipend

401(k)

Wellness days

Paid parental leave

Job summary

Primer seeks a Staff Machine Learning Engineer in Pasadena/remote-eligible role to own AI-driven products end to end. You’ll work across LLMs, agentic systems, retrieval, embeddings, and fine-tuned models, pushing from prototypes to scalable production systems with fast, reliable inference.

You will partner with product and engineering leaders to shape the technical roadmap, drive cross-functional collaboration, and raise the engineering bar with best practices.

Qualifications

• BS, MS, or PhD in computer science, a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 6+ years building production backend software, with a track record of shipping and operating ML-driven functionality.
• Mastery of data structures and algorithms, and the judgment to translate user needs into practical solutions.
• Hands-on depth with LLMs and agentic systems (prompt and context engineering, tool use, retrieval and RAG).
• Fluency authoring production APIs in Python (Rust a plus).
• High agency and a bias to action in ambiguous, fast-moving problems.

Responsibilities

• Set technical and product direction for LLM, agentic, and NLP systems.
• Design and build distributed, agentic systems at scale.
• Turn real-world data into trustworthy signals and knowledge graphs.
• Take models from checkpoint to production with low-latency inference.
• Develop evals and data flywheels to drive measurable quality.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to shape the technical roadmap.

Skills

Backend development

LLMs

Python

PyTorch

APIs

Rust

Distributed systems

Problem solving

Education

BS/MS/PhD in CS or related

Tools

PyTorch

Rust

Job description

Primer seeks a Staff Machine Learning Engineer in Pasadena/remote-eligible role to own AI-driven products end to end. You’ll work across LLMs, agentic systems, retrieval, embeddings, and fine-tuned models, pushing from prototypes to scalable production systems with fast, reliable inference.

You will partner with product and engineering leaders to shape the technical roadmap, drive cross-functional collaboration, and raise the engineering bar with best practices.