--- title: 'Senior/Staff Machine Learning Research Engineer, General Agents, Enterprise GenAI at Scale AI' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/senior-staff-machine-learning-research-engineer-general-agents-enterprise-genai-y2bqh76rpyfe' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-09-09' --- # Senior/Staff Machine Learning Research Engineer, General Agents, Enterprise GenAI at Scale AI - **Company:** Scale AI - **Location:** San Francisco, CA / New York, NY - **Compensation:** $265k–$331k - **Posted:** 2026-02-10 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-09 - **Apply:** https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/scaleai/jobs/4658162005 ## Job description Scale AI is the data foundation for AI, helping organizations build and deploy reliable production AI applications. We partner with leading enterprises and government organizations to accelerate their AI initiatives through our data annotation platform, generative AI solutions, and enterprise AI capabilities. ## About the General Agents Team The General Agents team, part of Scale’s Enterprise organization, builds robust general agents for customer use cases and applications. The team sits at the intersection of frontier agent development and real-world deployment, translating state-of-the-art reasoning and agentic capabilities into reliable, production-grade systems that drive real economic value. Our agents are scalable systems built around recurring enterprise problem domains, with a strong emphasis on generalization, extensibility, and deployment across many customers. ## About the Role As a Senior/Staff Machine Learning Engineer (MLE) on the General Agents team, you’ll play a critical role in designing, building, and deploying production-ready AI agents that solve high-impact enterprise problems. You will work across the full agent lifecycle—from model and system design to evaluation, deployment, and iteration—bridging cutting-edge agentic techniques with the constraints and requirements of real customer environments. You will: - Design and implement end-to-end agent systems that combine LLM reasoning, tool use, memory, and control logic to solve recurring enterprise use cases. - Build scalable, reliable agent architectures that can be deployed across many customers with varying data, tools, and constraints. - Develop evaluation frameworks, datasets, environments, and metrics to measure agent performance, reliability, and business impact in production settings. - Collaborate closely with product managers, customers, data annotators, and other engineering teams to translate enterprise requirements into robust agent designs. - Productionize frontier agent techniques (e.g., planning, multi-step reasoning and tool-use, multi-agent patterns) into maintainable, observable systems. - Own deployment, monitoring, and iteration of agent systems, including failure analysis and continuous improvement based on real-world usage. - Contribute to technical direction and architectural decisions for general agent development best practices and methods, with increasing scope and leadership at the Staff level. Ideally you’d have: - 5+ years of experience building and deploying machine learning or AI systems for real-world, production use cases. - Strong engineering fundamentals, supported by a Bachelor’s and/or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, AI, or equivalent practical experience. - Deep understanding of modern LLMs, prompt-, context-, and system-level optimization, and agentic system design. - Proven proficiency in Python, including writing production-quality, testable, and maintainable code. - Experience building systems that integrate models with external tools, APIs, databases, and services. - Ability to operate in ambiguous problem spaces, balancing research-driven approaches with pragmatic product constraints. - Strong communication skills and comfort working in customer-facing or cross-functional environments. Nice-to-haves: - Hands-on experience building AI agents using modern generative AI stacks (OpenAI APIs, commercial or open-source LLMs). - Experience with agent frameworks, orchestration layers, or workflow systems (e.g., tool calling, planners, multi-agent setups). - Familiarity with evaluation, monitoring, and observability for LLM-powered systems in production. - Experience deploying ML systems in cloud environments and operating them at scale. - Experience fine-tuning or adapting foundation models using methods like supervised fine-tuning (SFT), reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR), and low-rank adaptation (LoRA) to improve agent performance on domain-specific tasks. - Interest in shaping the future of general-purpose enterprise agents and their real-world impact. Compensation packages at Scale for eligible roles include base salary, equity, and benefits. The range displayed on each job posting reflects the minimum and maximum target for new hire salaries for the position and may be inclusive of several career levels at Scale; it will be determined during the interview process based on work location and additional factors, including job-related skills, experience, qualifications, interview performance, and relevant education or training. Scale employees in eligible roles are also granted equity based compensation, subject to Board of Director approval. Your recruiter can share more about the specific salary range for your preferred location during the hiring process, and confirm whether the hired role will be eligible for equity grant. You'll also receive benefits including, but not limited to: comprehensive health, dental and vision coverage, retirement benefits, a learning and development stipend, and generous PTO. Additionally, this role may be eligible for additional benefits such as a commuter stipend. Please reference the job posting's subtitle for where this position will be located. For pay transparency purposes, the base salary range for this full-time position in the locations of San Francisco, New York, Seattle is: $264,800—$331,000 USD PLEASE NOTE: Our policy requires a 90-day waiting period before reconsidering candidates for the same role. This allows us to ensure a fair and thorough evaluation of all applicants. About Us: At Scale, our mission is to develop reliable AI systems for the world's most important decisions. Our products provide the high-quality data and full-stack technologies that power the world's leading models, and help enterprises and governments build, deploy, and oversee AI applications that deliver real impact. We work closely with industry leaders like Meta, Ernst & Young, Mayo Clinic, Time Inc., the Government of Qatar, and U.S. government agencies including the Army and Air Force. We are expanding our team to accelerate the development of AI applications. We believe that everyone should be able to bring their whole selves to work, which is why we are proud to be an inclusive and equal opportunity workplace. We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability status, gender identity or Veteran status. We are committed to working with and providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with physical and mental disabilities. If you need assistance and/or a reasonable accommodation in the application or recruiting process due to a disability, please contact us at accommodations@scale.com. Please see the United States Department of Labor's [Know Your Rights poster](https://www.eeoc.gov/sites/default/files/2023-06/22-088_EEOC_KnowYourRights6.12ScreenRdr.pdf) for additional information. We comply with the United States Department of Labor's Pay Transparency provision. PLEASE NOTE: We collect, retain and use personal data for our professional business purposes, including notifying you of job opportunities that may be of interest and sharing with our affiliates. We limit the personal data we collect to that which we believe is appropriate and necessary to manage applicants’ needs, provide our services, and comply with applicable laws. Any information we collect in connection with your application will be treated in accordance with our internal policies and programs designed to protect personal data. Please see our [privacy policy](https://scale.com/legal/privacy) for additional information. ## About Scale AI ## Company Overview - **One-liner**: Scale AI provides high-quality data, RLHF, model evaluations, and full-stack AI infrastructure to help enterprises and governments build, deploy, and oversee reliable AI systems. - **Entity Type**: Private (49% non‑voting stake owned by Meta Platforms as of June 2025; total funding $1.6B across eight rounds) - **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, United States - **Founded**: 2016 - **Founders**: Alexandr Wang, Lucy Guo (Wang left in June 2025; current CEO is Jason Droege) ## Core Business - **Primary industry**: AI infrastructure, data annotation, large language model (LLM) evaluation, enterprise AI deployment - **Target customers**: B2B – Enterprise and government organizations; also serves leading AI labs (e.g., OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Meta, Microsoft, General Motors) - **Mission**: “Develop reliable AI systems for the world's most important decisions.” ## Products & Services - **Data at Scale**: High-quality training data, annotations, and RLHF for advanced AI models (SaaS + human-in-the-loop service) - **Evaluations**: Rigorous model evaluations, benchmarking, and red‑teaming to measure and improve AI performance (service) - **Applied AI**: Full‑stack AI systems that help enterprises and governments build, deploy, and oversee reliable AI (SaaS + consulting) - **Safety, Evaluation and Alignment Lab**: Research arm focused on LLM alignment and safety (internal R&D; also co‑created the “Humanity's Last Exam” benchmark) - **Subsidiaries**: Remotasks (computer vision and autonomous vehicle data labeling), Outlier (LLM data annotation) ## Market Standing - **Valuation**: $29B (as of 2025 – cited on scale.com) - **Key Metric**: Total Funding – $1.6B (including the $14B Meta investment that acquired a 49% non‑voting stake in June 2025) - **Notable Investors/Partners**: Meta Platforms (49% owner), with commercial customers including Google, Microsoft, Meta, General Motors, OpenAI, and Time. Also works with U.S. and Qatari governments. - **Growth Signals**: - Headcount: Scale.com cites “1,000+” employees; LinkedIn reports 3,751 employees (+32.1% YoY). - 90% of the world’s leading generative AI model builders are powered by Scale. - 15 billion human decisions used to train AI models; $1 billion paid to contributors globally. - Active job postings: 284+ (as of July 2025), with strong hiring in enterprise engineering, AI agents, and solutions roles. ## Competitive Advantages - **Data moat**: Scale’s proprietary Data Engine and access to millions of human‑annotated decisions create high‑quality training data that competitors cannot easily replicate. - **Trust & adoption**: Used by 90% of leading GenAI builders; runs private benchmarks for the most ambitious AI companies. - **Government credibility**: Direct contracts with the U.S. Department of Defense and international governments (e.g., Qatar) – a high‑barrier entry point. - **Full‑stack offering**: From raw data annotation to LLM evaluation and end‑to‑end applied AI deployment, Scale covers the entire AI lifecycle. - **Research leadership**: In‑house Safety, Evaluation and Alignment Lab; co‑creator of the “Humanity's Last Exam” benchmark. ## Strategic Focus - **Enterprise GenAI agents**: Ramping up “AgentOps” and “Frontier Agents” engineering teams (many open roles in SF, NY, London, Budapest). - **Healthcare & life sciences**: Hiring dedicated GTM leaders and AI strategists for healthcare vertical. - **International expansion**: Growing offices in London, Budapest, Mexico City, and Washington DC. - **Safety and alignment**: Continued investment in red‑teaming, model evaluations, and government‑focused AI safety contracts. ## Why Work Here - **Mission‑driven**: “Develop reliable AI systems for the world’s most important decisions” – directly shaping frontier AI capabilities. - **Compensation & benefits**: Comprehensive health, dental, vision, mental health services; generous PTO; annual learning & development stipend; parental leave; ERGs; guest‑friendly offices with happy hours, game nights, book clubs. - **Engineering culture**: Credos such as “Write the Market,” “Find the 20%,” “Earn Customer Love,” and “Quality is Our Cheat Code” emphasize impact over effort, customer obsession, and structured thinking. - **Growth trajectory**: Rapid headcount growth (+32%), major Meta investment, and expansion into new verticals signal a company in high‑growth mode. - **Flexible work**: Offices in SF, NY, London, Budapest, Mexico City, DC; the careers page highlights “flexible environment,” though specific remote/hybrid policy is not explicitly stated. ## Sources 1. [scale.com](https://scale.com/about) 2. [scale.com](https://scale.com/) 3. [scale.com/careers](https://scale.com/careers) 4. [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/scaleai) 5. 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