ML Software Engineer Jobs in California
ML Software Engineer jobs in California represent one of the most active and competitive markets in the country, concentrated in tech product development, AI research, autonomous systems, and enterprise software across seniority levels from entry-level to principal and staff engineer. The heaviest hiring is in the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, and San Diego, where companies like Google, Apple, and Qualcomm maintain large engineering organizations with dedicated machine learning teams. The most in-demand specialties are large language model fine-tuning, computer vision, and MLOps infrastructure. Find a role that fits below and apply directly.
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Engineering · Full-time · San Francisco
Our mission is to automate coding. The first step in our journey is to build the best tool for professional programmers, using a combination of inventive research, design, and engineering. Our organization is very flat, and our team is small and talent dense. We particularly like people who are truth-seeking, passionate, and creative. We enjoy spirited debate, crazy ideas, and shipping code.
About the role
As a Software Engineer on the RL Data team, you’ll design and build the tools that researchers and external contributors use to create, review, submit, and monitor the environments and tasks behind Cursor’s reinforcement-learning runs. This is a full-stack product-engineering role embedded in a research team.
You’ll own the review and acceptance experience end to end: from rollout and transcript inspection, task-quality signals grader and reward-hacking analysis, to the workflows that move a submission into training. From there, you’ll build authoring interfaces that let researchers, vendors, and domain experts create and improve environments and tasks quickly and confidently.
Your work will significantly shorten the loop from a task idea or data sources, to candidate task, to trusted training data.
What you’ll work on
Create fast, trustworthy workflows for vendors and research team to interact effectively with each other — vendor task creation and iteration, vendor submissions, and task acceptance into training.
Build review tools for inspecting and comparing rollouts, transcripts, grader outputs, and other signals of task quality.
Develop environment-health, failure-search, versioning, and catalog experiences that make training data easy to understand, manage, and extend.
Establish a shared component kit, then use it to build self-serve interfaces for creating and improving tasks with quality checks inline.
You may be a fit if
You’ve shipped full-stack products and owned systems from user interface through storage or services, using technologies such as TypeScript and React alongside Node, Python, or Go.
You’ve built dense, data-facing tools such as transcript viewers, diffing systems, review queues, observability products, or operational dashboards—and you have strong opinions about how structured data should be rendered.
You’ve built or maintained a design system or component library and can establish durable product and engineering conventions for a fast-moving team.
You’ve designed review, QA, moderation, fraud, or acceptance workflows where users had an incentive to get past the checks, and you know how to keep those systems honest.
You care about data quality, and are willing to inspect raw data. Experience with evaluations, graders, reinforcement learning, or data-quality systems is helpful but not required.
You move quickly under ambiguity, collaborate closely with researchers and domain experts, and take open-ended problems from rough need to reliable product.
ing
If there appears to be a fit, we’ll schedule two or three short technical interviews focused on frontend craft for dense data and system design for a review-and-acceptance workflow. After that, we’ll invite you onsite to work on a small project using real rollouts, discuss ideas, and meet the team.
#LI-DNI
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Find ML Software Engineer JobsML Software Engineer Jobs by City in California
Where California roles are concentrated, by current openings.
ML Software Engineer Job Market in California
A snapshot from current California openings, updated as new roles post.
Who's Hiring
- Meta13

- Google11

- Apple8

- Nuro6

- Zoox5

Top Industries Hiring
- Technology & Software23
- Automotive6
- Electronics & Hardware4
- Banking & Financial Services3
- Science & Research2
What California Employers Look For
The qualifications that appear most often in ML software engineer jobs across California.
- Bachelor's or master's degree in computer science, electrical engineering, or a related technical field
- Proficiency in Python and machine learning frameworks such as PyTorch or TensorFlow
- Experience designing and deploying production ML models at scale
- Familiarity with cloud platforms such as Google Cloud, AWS, or Azure for model training and serving
- Strong foundation in statistics, linear algebra, and algorithm design
- Experience with MLOps tooling including experiment tracking, model versioning, and CI/CD pipelines
ML Software Engineer Jobs in California: Frequently Asked Questions
How do you become a ml software engineer in California?
There is no state-issued license or board registration required to work as a ml software engineer in California. The typical path is a bachelor's or master's degree in computer science, statistics, or a related field, followed by building a portfolio of end-to-end ML projects. California employers, particularly in the Bay Area and Los Angeles, strongly favor candidates who can demonstrate deployed model experience, contributions to open-source ML projects, or completion of research published alongside coursework.
How much do ML software engineers make in California?
ML software engineers in California earn a median of about $174,410 a year, based on May 2025 Bureau of Labor Statistics wage data, ranging from around $105,060 for the lowest 10% to over $272,670 for the top 10%. Pay rises with experience, specialty, and employer.
Which companies hire ml software engineers in California?
Employers hiring ml software engineers in California right now include Meta, Google, and Apple, based on current listings on Migrate Mate as of September 2026. California's concentration of AI-focused product companies, semiconductor firms, and large-scale consumer platforms makes it one of the deepest hiring pools for this role anywhere in the country.
Which California cities have the most ml software engineer jobs?
San Francisco, Mountain View, and Sunnyvale have the most ml software engineer openings in California. The Bay Area dominates because of its density of AI-native companies, research labs, and major tech headquarters, while Los Angeles is driven by entertainment technology, autonomous vehicle programs, and a growing startup ecosystem, and San Diego sees consistent demand from defense contractors and Qualcomm's semiconductor and wireless AI division.
Are there remote ml software engineer jobs in California?
Yes, and more than most fields. About 56% of ml software engineer openings tied to California are remote or hybrid as of September 2026, reflecting how well this work translates to distributed teams. Model research, experimentation, and data pipeline development are the most frequently offered in fully remote arrangements, while roles tied to on-site hardware, robotics, or lab infrastructure tend to require in-person presence.
How can I get hired as a ml software engineer in California with little or no experience?
The most realistic entry path is securing an associate or junior ML engineer role, often titled ML engineer I or research engineer, at a mid-size California tech company after completing a master's program with a thesis or project involving real data and model deployment. Large California employers like Google and Meta run structured new-grad programs that recruit directly from university research labs. Candidates transitioning from adjacent roles such as data analyst, data scientist, or software engineer strengthen their candidacy with a public portfolio of trained models, an ML specialization certificate, or a research paper co-authored with a university supervisor.
Where can I find and apply to ml software engineer jobs in California?
You can find and apply to ml software engineer jobs in California on Migrate Mate, which lists current California openings from employers actively hiring for this role. Find roles that fit your experience level and location preference and apply directly.
See All 114+ ML Software Engineer Jobs in California
Find roles in California that match your experience and apply in just a few clicks.
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