Machine Learning Engineer
US$278,000 – US$330,000 / yr base salary
Posted 18 Feb 2026
Advertised as “Staff Machine Learning Engineer”
BranchFactor Summary
The original posting with the fluff stripped out
- Expected experience
- 10+ yrs
- Management level
- People management
- Employment
- Hybrid
| Base salary | US$278,000 – US$330,000 / yr |
|---|
Field of studyComputer Science (or related)
Study levelBachelor's or higher
The OpportunityDo you want to lead projects to build and deploy cutting-edge AI technology to help people get unparalleled value from meetings and conversations? Join our core AI team responsible for ML and work alongside industry-veteran scientists and engineers. As a Staff Machine Learning Engineer, you’ll bring your strong software engineering mindset to machine learning in order to scale and optimize our ML systems—creating and transforming innovative research into production-ready features that power Otter’s summarization and conversational intelligence products.
Your Impact
- Architect, build, and evolve large-scale SID / ASR / NLP / LLM systems that power mission-critical product experiences including summarization, chat, and speech understanding across millions of conversations.
- Lead the design and implementation of training, fine-tuning, post-training, and inference strategies for large language and speech models using PyTorch and/or JAX, making principled trade-offs across quality, latency, cost, and reliability.
- Design and improve model architectures, loss functions, decoding strategies, and training techniques for speech and language models, informed by both research and production constraints.
- Own end-to-end ML system lifecycles, from research prototyping through production deployment, monitoring, iteration, and long-term maintenance.
- Partner deeply with product, and infrastructure teams to develop and translate cutting-edge research into scalable, production-grade systems that deliver measurable user and business impact.
- Drive system-level improvements in model performance, robustness, observability, and operational excellence using real-world conversational data at scale.
- Set technical direction and best practices for ML infrastructure, data pipelines, evaluation frameworks, and deployment workflows in a cloud environment.
- Identify and resolve complex, ambiguous problems in model behavior, data quality, scaling, and system interactions, often before they surface as user-visible issues.
- Mentor and elevate other engineers, influencing team standards, reviewing designs, and contributing to a culture of strong technical decision-making and execution.
- Influence applied research and technical roadmaps by identifying promising speech and multimodal modeling approaches, and driving their validation and adoption into production systems