Staff AI/ML Engineer: Edge ML & Distillation

Jobtailor; California (MO); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

Jobtailor is seeking a senior ML engineer to design and build knowledge distillation pipelines, transferring reasoning, vision, and language capabilities into compact edge-deployable architectures. You will guide ML architecture decisions and lead edge-optimized model strategies across teams.

You will apply parameter-efficient fine-tuning (LoRA/QLoRA), implement quantization-aware training, and collaborate on data collection, dataset curation, and model evaluation for safe, scalable in-vehicle

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Data Science, Mathematics, or equivalent practical experience
• 8+ years of software engineering or applied ML research experience
• Experience setting technical direction, making architectural decisions on ML systems, and guiding other engineers
• Based in or willing to work hybrid out of Mountain View, CA or Seattle, WA, reporting to the office at least three days per week
• Master's degree or Ph.D. in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, or related field preferred

Responsibilities

• Design and build knowledge distillation pipelines transferring reasoning, vision, and language capabilities into compact edge-deployable architectures
• Apply and scale parameter-efficient fine-tuning techniques such as LoRA and QLoRA
• Build and own the reinforcement learning flywheel using human-in-the-loop alignment with RLHF/DPO
• Connect in-cabin data collection with continuous model improvement
• Curate, evaluate, and synthetically generate datasets for passenger intent and complex in-vehicle visual cues
• Implement Quantization-Aware Training and related techniques to prevent accuracy degradation during hardware compression
• Establish evaluation frameworks and benchmarks measuring hallucination rates, domain accuracy, and safety constraints
• Own the base model strategy and decide which foundation architectures to use
• Set architectural direction for model optimization pipelines as an individual-contributor technical leader
• Validate AI capabilities on representative vehicle hardware and chart practical paths to scale

Skills

PyTorch

Knowledge Distillation

Fine-Tuning

Quantization

Reinforcement Learning

Edge Deployment

Model Compression

Open-source

Communication

Education

Bachelor's degree

Master's degree

PhD

Tools

Hugging Face

DeepSpeed

Ray

Megatron

Job description

Jobtailor is seeking a senior ML engineer to design and build knowledge distillation pipelines, transferring reasoning, vision, and language capabilities into compact edge-deployable architectures. You will guide ML architecture decisions and lead edge-optimized model strategies across teams.

You will apply parameter-efficient fine-tuning (LoRA/QLoRA), implement quantization-aware training, and collaborate on data collection, dataset curation, and model evaluation for safe, scalable in-vehicle