Staff ML Engineer, Model Training (Remote)

Zekai; United States; Remote; USD 200,000 - 320,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity compensation

Performance bonuses

Remote-first workforce

Health insurance reimbursement

401(k) plan with company match

Job summary

Zekai is seeking a Member of Technical Staff, Model Training (applied research) for a fully remote position. You will work across language models, multimodal systems, robotics, and autonomous agents to develop models optimized for specific applications and environments.

You will own the full model development lifecycle, from data requirements to production deployment, with emphasis on efficiency, latency, and cost. Collaborate with research and platform teams to bring prototypes to scale.

Qualifications

• Strong foundations in machine learning and deep learning.
• Hands-on experience with training, adapting, and evaluating AI models.
• Proficiency in Python and PyTorch for training, evaluation, and inference pipelines.
• Ability to translate application requirements into measurable model objectives and benchmarks.
• Solid software engineering fundamentals for maintainable production code.
• Familiarity with fine-tuning, distillation, imitation learning, or reinforcement learning.
• Good experimental judgment to identify bottlenecks and trade-offs.

Responsibilities

• Train, fine-tune, and adapt language, vision-language, and robotics models.
• Develop specialized models for multimodal understanding and autonomous agents.
• Build simulation-based training and evaluation environments for policy learning.
• Combine demonstrations, human feedback, synthetic datasets, and trajectories into training data and curricula.
• Develop models that power partner workflows for data generation, annotation, and automated grading.
• Incorporate expert corrections and model feedback into iterative training cycles.
• Optimize models for production inference balancing quality, latency, and cost against frontier baselines.
• Collaborate with research and platform teams to productionize prototypes into scalable deployments.

Skills

ML foundations

Hands-on ML training

Python and PyTorch

Requirements-to-objectives translation

Software engineering fundamentals

Model adaptation techniques

Experimental judgment

Job description

Zekai is seeking a Member of Technical Staff, Model Training (applied research) for a fully remote position. You will work across language models, multimodal systems, robotics, and autonomous agents to develop models optimized for specific applications and environments.

You will own the full model development lifecycle, from data requirements to production deployment, with emphasis on efficiency, latency, and cost. Collaborate with research and platform teams to bring prototypes to scale.