Machine Learning Engineer

Summary

Join Vectara, a leading provider of enterprise AI agents and assistants, and contribute to the development and improvement of our cutting-edge RAG platform. We are seeking a highly skilled AI engineer to design, build, and deploy innovative AI systems. You will work on projects involving natural language processing, information retrieval, and large language models. The ideal candidate possesses a strong background in machine learning, software engineering, and a passion for pushing the boundaries of AI. We offer a competitive salary and benefits package, including equity ownership, comprehensive health insurance, generous PTO, and professional development opportunities. We value diversity and inclusion and encourage applications from all qualified individuals.

Requirements

• BS/MS in Computer Science, Statistics, Electrical/Computer Engineering, Mathematics, or a related field
• 5+/4+ years of experience after BS/MS
• Strong software engineering basics, we work on research but also write production code
• Knowledge of common challenges in training ML models and solutions to them
• Familiarity with the technical details of deep learning concepts, such as Transformers, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), mixture of experts (MoE)
• Proficiency in data/ML libraries such as pandas, transformers, and torch
• Hands-on experience in training ML systems end-to-end from data curation to evaluation and deployment
• Ability to collaborate with cross-functional teams

Responsibilities

• Design, prototype, research and build AI systems for Vectara
• Train, evaluate and deploy ML models in the domains of Natural Language Processing, Information Retrieval, AI Agents, Large Language Models (LLMs) and Multimodal Large Models (MLMs)
• Improve the quality of Vectara’s RAG-as-a-service platform, working on features like multilinguality, self-supervised learning, agentic behavior and hallucination reduction
• Publish technical blogs, papers, and patents

Preferred Qualifications

• PhD in Computer Science/Engineering with 1+ years of industry experience
• Publications in prestigious venues such as ACL, NAACL, EMNLP, NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR as a key author
• Experience as an ML engineer in an early-stage, high growth environment
• Expertise in the following areas: Embedding models, rerankers
• Expertise in the following areas: Multimodal retrieval, question answering, and reasoning
• Expertise in the following areas: Vector databases, BM25
• Expertise in the following areas: Planning and reasoning in LLMs
• Expertise in the following areas: Multilinguality in LLMs
• Expertise in the following areas: NLG Evaluation such as hallucination detection

Benefits

• 100% paid Medical, Dental, Vision begins on your first day!
• Option of Health Savings Account (HSA) or Flexible Savings Account (FSA)
• Generous paid time off (PTO) plus paid sick time, holidays, and company rest days
• Professional development and training opportunities
• Company virtual happy hours and fun team building activities and more
• Equity ownership in the company