Senior Staff ML Engineer — Lead Agentic AI (Remote)

53 Stations; San Francisco (CA); Remote; USD 250,000 - 295,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Flexible Time Off

Parental Leave

Health Benefits

401(k) Plan

Commuter Benefits

Wellness Program

Pet Insurance

Employee Assistance Program

Dependent Care FSA

Job summary

Altana is seeking a Senior Staff Machine Learning Engineer to lead AI for Altana Nexus, our real-time platform for global trade. You’ll design architecting agentic systems that ingest shipments, declarations and documents to produce risk, classification and compliance decisions in real time.

You will drive end-to-end ML pipelines, adapt models with feedback, and shape product direction while mentoring engineers and collaborating with customers to ship impactful capabilities across a global

Qualifications

• BS/MS in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or related field, or equivalent experience.
• 10+ years building and shipping ML systems in production, including recent LLM work.
• Deep expertise in PyTorch and the modern Python ML stack (Hugging Face, scikit-learn, NumPy, Pandas/Polars).
• Hands-on experience building production LLM applications: retrieval-augmented generation, tool/function calling, structured outputs, and agentic workflows.
• Shipped agentic systems in production and knowledge of failure modes: tool use, planning, state, recovery and human-in-the-loop.
• Experience post-training or adapting LLMs (SFT, DPO, RLHF/RLAIF) for production use.
• Rigorous evaluation: built eval suites, golden datasets and LLM-as-judge pipelines.
• Sound judgment on frontier vs fine-tuned vs classical models balancing cost, latency, accuracy.
• Senior lead traits: set architecture direction, mentor engineers, translate problems to roadmaps.
• Willingness to apply SOTA techniques to real-world problems and share knowledge.

Responsibilities

• Define architecture and roadmap for agentic systems processing trade data in real time.
• Lead the design of ingestion, document understanding, entity resolution, inference and routing pipelines.
• Tune models using analyst feedback, production outcomes and agent traces.
• Build observability, evals, tracing and feedback loops to catch regressions in production.
• Mentor senior engineers, raise the technical bar, and shape how we hire ML talent.
• Collaborate with software, data science, product and customers to turn problems into shipped capabilities.

Skills

ML systems

PyTorch

LLM apps

Agentic systems

Post-training LLMs

Evaluation suites

Architecture leadership

Communication skills

AI coding tools

Education

BS/MS in CS/ML

Tools

Docker

Git

Kubernetes

Swagger/OpenAPI

AWS

Azure

Job description

Altana is seeking a Senior Staff Machine Learning Engineer to lead AI for Altana Nexus, our real-time platform for global trade. You’ll design architecting agentic systems that ingest shipments, declarations and documents to produce risk, classification and compliance decisions in real time.

You will drive end-to-end ML pipelines, adapt models with feedback, and shape product direction while mentoring engineers and collaborating with customers to ship impactful capabilities across a global