Machine Learning Scientist
US$124,500 – US$272,000 / yr base salary
Posted 14 Jul 2026
Advertised as “Senior Staff / Principal Machine Learning Scientist, AI Inference & Optimization”
BranchFactor Summary
The original posting with the fluff stripped out
- Expected experience
- 10+ yrs
- Management level
- Individual contributor
| Base salary | US$124,500 – US$272,000 / yr |
|---|
Field of studyComputer Science, Electrical Engineering, Machine learning
Study levelMaster's
Study levelDoctorate
Join the Future of Security at Netskope
Netskope (NASDAQ: NTSK) is a leader in modern security and networking for the cloud and AI era. We secure and accelerate cloud, data, and AI in real time, everywhere. Thousands of customers, including more than 30 of the Fortune 100, trust the Netskope One platform, its Zero Trust Engine, and the powerful NewEdge network to gain full visibility and control without performance trade-offs.
At Netskope, our technology is driven by our greatest strength: our people. We believe that belonging powers innovation, and success is both personal and organizational. We embrace differences in gender, ethnicity, beliefs, ability, and identity, creating an environment where every voice is heard and respected. We empower our employees to bring their authentic selves to work, grow their careers through continuous education and mentorship, and lead with transparency and curiosity. Join a team where you belong, where you are encouraged to be an entrepreneur, and where together, we continue to redefine the landscape of security.
Visit Careers at Netskope to learn more. Follow us on LinkedIn and Instagram.
Positions are available at Senior Staff and above. Candidates are assessed individually and leveled according to their specific skills and background.
About the role
As a Senior Staff Machine Learning Scientist, you own the inference and optimization layer that makes AI in agentic workflows fast, efficient, and production-grade. You fine-tune and evaluate models, push latency and throughput on real hardware, and build the runtime that executes bounded AI tasks, validated against usage from Netskope’s large customer base so you optimize where the data points, not where you guess.
What’s in it for you
- High-impact ownership. You own the model layer of a net-new product that changes the performance and economics of agentic AI.
- Cutting-edge, unusual stack. The hard, interesting inference problems live here: quantization, KV-cache and memory management, sparsity, fine-tuning, and hardware acceleration under real-world resource constraints.
- Real scale to build against. Netskope’s customer footprint gives you production signals most teams never see, so you deploy, validate, and iterate fast.
What you will be doing
- Build and optimize the model inference path: quantization, KV-cache optimization, batching, and latency/memory/throughput tuning on constrained, commodity hardware.