Staff Applied AI Software Engineer

The Browser Company; New York (NY); Remote; USD 250,000 - 300,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading company in New York is seeking a Machine Learning Engineer to join their team. You will work on optimizing LLMs and building innovative features for their new browser. This role emphasizes collaboration, creativity, and technical expertise in machine learning. The company values diversity and offers a flexible work environment with competitive compensation and benefits.

Benefits

Comprehensive benefits package

401k plan

Flexible vacation policy

Remote-friendly working environment

12 weeks of paid parental leave

$1,500 USD home office stipend

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience optimizing ML models.
• Deep experience fine-tuning open-source LLMs.
• Production experience with Python.

Responsibilities

• Fine-tune and optimize LLMs for performance.
• Build evaluation pipelines to track model performance.
• Collaborate with product teams to enhance user experience.

Skills

Optimization

Performance

Collaboration

Problem Solving

Tools

Python

MLX

ONNX

TFLite

Job description

Hi, we're The Browser Company and we're building a better way to use the internet.

Browsers are unique in that they are one of the only pieces of software that you share with your parents as well as your kids. Which makes sense, they're our doorway to the most important things — through them we socialize with loved ones, work on our passion projects, and explore our curiosities. But on their own, they don’t actually do a whole lot, they’re kind of just there. They don’t help us organize our messy lives or make it easier to compose our ideas. We believe that the browser could do so much more — it can empower and support the amazing things we do on the internet. That’s why we’re building one: a browser that can help us grow, create, and stay curious.

To accomplish this lofty task, we’re building a diverse team of people from different backgrounds and experiences. This isn’t optional, it’s crucial to our mission, as we need a wide range of perspectives to challenge our assumptions and shape our browser through a bold, creative lens. With that in mind, we especially encourage women, people of color, and others from historically marginalized groups to apply.

About The Role

Browsers know everything about us and what we do everyday, yet they can’t predict our next move, morph themselves to better suit our tasks, or proactively reduce repetitive tasks during your work day. At The Browser Company, we’re changing that by building Dia.

As a Machine Learning Engineer, you’ll be working alongside ML engineers, product engineers, designers, and our cofounder and CTO, Hursh Agrawal, to build the next LLM-powered interface for the internet. You’ll collect datasets and build evals, fine-tune LLMs and smaller transformers like BERT, and iterate on our how we host models both in the cloud and on-device to improve latency and resource usage.

Overall you will...

• Fine-tune, distill, and optimize LLMs to improve performance, reduce latency, and enhance efficiency for on-device and cloud-based inference.

• Improve our on-device model architecture, leveraging frameworks like MLX, ONNX, and TFLite to ensure models run efficiently across different devices.

• Experiment with and integrate new LLMs, fine-tuning them for specific browser-based use cases while balancing quality, speed, and resource constraints.

• Build evaluation pipelines to track model performance, accuracy, and real-world effectiveness over time.

• Collaborate with product ops teams to build and improve datasets that accurately match product needs.

• Collaborate with product engineers and designers to prototype and ship AI-powered features that enhance user experience.

• Optimize inference strategies, including running models on-device, in the cloud, or in hybrid configurations to maximize throughput and resource usage.

After 1 month you will...

• Onboard to the team and codebase with your onboarding buddy

• Attend onboarding presentations about the company, product, codebase, and culture

• Get familiar with the Swift language, the Dia codebase, and how we ship features

• Ship a few bug fixes and small improvements across our codebase and tooling

• Have trained your first model, either improving an existing flow or enabling an entirely new one

• Have pair programmed with a few people on the engineering team

• Be regularly posting product feedback about the browser in our #dogfooding channel

After 3 months you will...

• Be familiar with how we prototype and build new features, working with product engineers to brainstorm ways to use models to add intelligence to Dia

• Be familiar with our cloud infrastructure and data pipelines

• Be familiar with how we run inference both on-device and in the cloud

• Be testing new prototypes with existing, on-device models to test performance and viability

• Participate in product brainstorms to think about the future of Dia

• Be trained to interview candidates for roles at the Browser Company

• Be contributing to on-call rotations and jumping into incidents to support the team

• Regularly attend weekly engineering discussions about our architecture, how we do code review, code style, and more

After 6 months you will...

• Collaborate with our CTO and other ML and infrastructure engineers to shape the product roadmap

• Creatively solve problems with product engineers, using pragmatic solutions ranging from basic heuristics, regressions, ML models, to AI depending on the feature

• Own our on-device model architecture, updating it to try new models, change how we work with LoRA adapters, and optimizing it for performance and quality

• Own our infrastructure to collect training data and fine-tune models for our use-cases

• Have built out mechanisms to assess quality and performance, and be working with product teams to improve the efficacy of our models and heuristics

• Drive projects from conception to production launch independently

• Be mentoring and pair-programming with newer engineers to help them get spun up on the codebase

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience optimizing and productionizing modern ML models, especially ones that run in a real-world product environment (bonus if you’ve worked closely with transformer models)

• You have deep experience fine-tuning open-source LLMs and going beyond simple LoRA fine-tuning

• You have production experience with a modern coding language like Python

• You're passionate about on-device performance and excited to push the boundaries of what's possible in a browser

• You have experience independently running critical projects, shipping ML features, and leading initiatives with minimal guidance

• You’re pragmatic, motivated by nebulous problems, and excited to work in a startup environment with quick product validation cycles.

• We’re primarily focused on hiring in North American time zones and require that folks have 4+ hours of overlap time with team members in Eastern Time Zone.

Compensation and Benefits

With our flexible compensation model, employees have the ability to choose the cash-to-equity ratio that best suits their individual needs. Every offer we extend includes three options: a salary-optimized offer, an equity-optimized offer, and a balanced offer.

The annual salary range for this role is $250,000 - $300,000 USD. The actual salary range offered will vary based on experience level and interview performance.

️ In addition to a competitive salary and equity package, we provide every employee with the following benefits:

• comprehensive benefits package with employee medical, dental, and vision - we cover 100% of premiums for employees, and up to 95% for dependents

• 401k plan

• flexible vacation policy - on average, our team members take between 15-20 vacation days a year, plus federal holidays (holidays vary by location)

• remote-friendly working environment - our core working hours are 11 AM-2 PM Eastern Time

• 12 weeks of paid parental leave

• $1,500 USD home office stipend

• Employees based in the US also receive additional services like free annual memberships to One Medical (where available), Talkspace, Teladoc, and HealthAdvocate

The Browser Company is a well-funded, ambitious startup of close to 100 people (and growing!) who are passionate about building great products. We are a remote-first, distributed team, with the option to work from office in Brooklyn, New York. We strongly support diversity and encourage people from all backgrounds to apply.

To read more about what we value as a company, check out Notes on Roadtrips on our blog.