Staff Machine Learning Engineer
$205k - $240k • Remote • Boston, MA; Brooklyn, NY; San Francisco, CA; Washington, D.C. • Full-time
Posted 16d ago
Job Location
Boston, MA; Brooklyn, NY; San Francisco, CA; Washington, D.C.
Tech Stack
Remote Work Policy
Fully remote
Employment Type
Full-time
Categories
Machine Learning Engineer
About the job
Altana is seeking a Senior Staff Machine Learning Engineer to lead the AI development for Altana Nexus, an agentic platform focused on global trade. This role involves working with extensive trade data to build AI models and agents that enable real-time risk, compliance, and enforcement decisions for governments and major corporations. The position offers the opportunity to drive technical direction, design and build robust data processing pipelines, and adapt and improve machine learning models using various techniques like fine-tuning and reinforcement learning.
Responsibilities
- Drive the technical direction and roadmap for agentic systems processing trade data into real-time risk and compliance decisions.
- Design and lead the development of reliable, cost-efficient systems for data ingestion, document understanding, entity resolution, and model inference.
- Adapt and post-train models (SFT, DPO, RL) using analyst feedback and production outcomes to improve performance.
- Build observability and feedback mechanisms, including evaluation suites, tracing, and feedback loops.
- Mentor senior engineers, elevate the technical standard across the engineering team, and contribute to hiring and leveling ML talent.
- Collaborate with cross-functional teams to generate business ideas and translate ambiguous problems into shipped product features.
Requirements
- BS/MS in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or equivalent experience.
- 8+ years of experience building and shipping production ML systems, with a focus on product-oriented ML solutions and recent LLM-powered products.
- Deep expertise in PyTorch and the modern Python ML stack (Hugging Face, scikit-learn, NumPy, Pandas/Polars).
- Hands-on experience building production LLM applications, including RAG, tool/function calling, structured outputs, and agentic workflows.
- Proven experience shipping agentic systems in production, understanding their failure modes (tool use, planning, state, recovery, human-in-the-loop).
- Experience with post-training or adapting LLMs (SFT, DPO, RLHF/RLAIF, reward modeling) for production use cases.
- Proficiency in building evaluation suites, golden datasets, and LLM-as-judge pipelines.
- Sound judgment in selecting appropriate models (frontier API, fine-tuned open-weight, classical ML) based on cost, latency, and accuracy.
- Passion for applying SOTA techniques to real-world problems and a willingness to engage deeply with data and domain specifics.
- Commitment to engineering excellence, supportability, and knowledge-sharing.
- Strong written and verbal communication skills.
- Proficiency in using AI coding tools like Cursor or Claude Code.
Benefits
- Competitive salary range
- Competitive equity grants
- Discretionary bonus or variable compensation plan
- Flexible Time Off (FTO) policy
- Industry-leading Paid Parental Leave (PPL) - 14 weeks for non-birthing/adoptive/foster parents, up to 26 weeks for birthing parents, all paid at 100% base salary.
- Comprehensive health, vision, and dental benefits with generous employer contributions.
- 100% employer-paid high deductible health plan for employees.
- Employer contribution to Health Savings Account (HSA).
- Flexible Spending Account (FSA) option.
- Company-paid life, short-term disability, and long-term disability insurance.
- Company-paid AD&D insurance.