Sr Staff Machine Learning Engineer Jobs in California
Sr Staff Machine Learning Engineer jobs in California represent one of the most active and competitive markets in the country, concentrated heavily in the technology, healthcare AI, autonomous systems, and fintech sectors across all seniority levels. The greatest hiring density sits in the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, and San Diego, where companies like Google, Apple, and Qualcomm maintain major engineering operations and consistently recruit at this level. The most in-demand specialties include large language model development, computer vision, and ML infrastructure and platform engineering. Find a role that fits below and apply directly.
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Showing 5 of 146+ Sr Staff Machine Learning Engineer jobs
About Pinterest:
Millions of people around the world come to our platform to find creative ideas, dream about new possibilities and plan for memories that will last a lifetime. At Pinterest, we're on a mission to bring everyone the inspiration to create a life they love, and that starts with the people behind the product.
Discover a career where you ignite innovation for millions, transform passion into growth opportunities, celebrate each other's unique experiences and embrace the flexibility to do your best work. Creating a career you love? It's Possible.
At Pinterest, AI isn't just a feature, it's a powerful partner that augments our creativity and amplifies our impact, and we're looking for candidates who are excited to be a part of that. To get a complete picture of your experience and abilities, we'll explore your foundational skills and how you collaborate with AI.
Through our interview process, what matters most is that you can always explain your approach, showing us not just what you know, but how you think. You can read more about our AI interview philosophy and how we use AI in our recruiting process here.
Our Retrieval team builds shared machine learning capabilities that help Pinterest connect people with relevant ideas. We are looking for a Staff Machine Learning Engineer to advance how we develop those capabilities through agentic AI.
Your primary focus will be Reflex, our effort to automate and accelerate recommendation research and development. You will own a major technical area, building agents that investigate opportunities, implement changes, run experiments and learn from their results. You will work closely with other technical leaders while remaining hands-on with the hardest engineering and modeling problems.
You will also contribute to generative retrieval, with a particular focus on Semantic IDs: learning structured representations of content that recommendation models can generate and use to retrieve relevant items. This role combines applied AI research, production engineering and technical leadership, with opportunities to improve both our recommendation models and the way engineers build them.
What you'll do:
- Own and advance a major technical area in automated recommendation research within Reflex, collaborating with other technical leads and partner teams.
- Build LLM agents that connect hypothesis generation, implementation, experiment execution, evaluation and learning from previous results.
- Develop rigorous evaluations for agent behavior and research outputs, and use them to improve quality, reliability and efficiency.
- Contribute to generative retrieval models, particularly Semantic ID learning, evaluation and integration into production recommendation systems.
- Take promising ideas from research and prototypes through offline evaluation, online experimentation and production launches.
- Build reliable integrations with ML development infrastructure and make informed tradeoffs across model quality, iteration speed, compute cost and operational complexity.
- Raise technical quality through hands-on implementation, design and code reviews, documentation and mentorship.
- Work with research, recommendation and ML infrastructure teams to shape technical approaches, resolve dependencies and support adoption.
- Identify and apply relevant advances from research, and contribute new methods where existing approaches fall short.
What we're looking for:
- Bachelor's in Computer Science, Machine Learning or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
- Minimum 8 years of experience building and shipping ML or AI systems, including substantial hands-on engineering and technical leadership.
- Demonstrated experience building LLM agents or other agentic AI systems for complex tasks, with a clear approach to evaluating and improving their performance.
- Strong ML fundamentals and depth in one or more relevant areas, such as applied LLMs, representation learning, recommendation systems, retrieval or ML systems.
- Experience taking research ideas into reliable production systems and evaluating their impact through meaningful experiments.
- Strong software engineering skills, including the ability to design maintainable systems, implement difficult components and conduct thorough technical reviews.
- Experience leading a substantial technical area, making decisions under ambiguity and collaborating effectively across teams.
- A track record of mentoring engineers and raising the quality of a team's technical work.
- Clear written and verbal communication, including the ability to explain technical tradeoffs to different audiences.
- A disciplined approach to using AI in your own work, including verification of generated code, analysis and conclusions.
We'll teach you our stack and our products, and we're committed to your continued growth as a technical leader. This is an individual contributor role; prior people management isn't required.
Relocation Statement:
- This position is not eligible for relocation assistance. Visit our PinFlex page to learn more about our working model.
In-Office Requirement Statement:
- We let the type of work you do guide the collaboration style. That means we're not always working in an office, but we continue to gather for key moments of collaboration and connection.
- This role will need to be in the office for in-person collaboration 1-2 times/quarter and therefore can be situated anywhere in the country.
#LI-REMOTE
#LI-DM57
Our Commitment to Inclusion:
About Pinterest:
Millions of people around the world come to our platform to find creative ideas, dream about new possibilities and plan for memories that will last a lifetime. At Pinterest, we're on a mission to bring everyone the inspiration to create a life they love, and that starts with the people behind the product.
Discover a career where you ignite innovation for millions, transform passion into growth opportunities, celebrate each other's unique experiences and embrace the flexibility to do your best work. Creating a career you love? It's Possible.
At Pinterest, AI isn't just a feature, it's a powerful partner that augments our creativity and amplifies our impact, and we're looking for candidates who are excited to be a part of that. To get a complete picture of your experience and abilities, we'll explore your foundational skills and how you collaborate with AI.
Through our interview process, what matters most is that you can always explain your approach, showing us not just what you know, but how you think. You can read more about our AI interview philosophy and how we use AI in our recruiting process here.
Our Retrieval team builds shared machine learning capabilities that help Pinterest connect people with relevant ideas. We are looking for a Staff Machine Learning Engineer to advance how we develop those capabilities through agentic AI.
Your primary focus will be Reflex, our effort to automate and accelerate recommendation research and development. You will own a major technical area, building agents that investigate opportunities, implement changes, run experiments and learn from their results. You will work closely with other technical leaders while remaining hands-on with the hardest engineering and modeling problems.
You will also contribute to generative retrieval, with a particular focus on Semantic IDs: learning structured representations of content that recommendation models can generate and use to retrieve relevant items. This role combines applied AI research, production engineering and technical leadership, with opportunities to improve both our recommendation models and the way engineers build them.
What you'll do:
- Own and advance a major technical area in automated recommendation research within Reflex, collaborating with other technical leads and partner teams.
- Build LLM agents that connect hypothesis generation, implementation, experiment execution, evaluation and learning from previous results.
- Develop rigorous evaluations for agent behavior and research outputs, and use them to improve quality, reliability and efficiency.
- Contribute to generative retrieval models, particularly Semantic ID learning, evaluation and integration into production recommendation systems.
- Take promising ideas from research and prototypes through offline evaluation, online experimentation and production launches.
- Build reliable integrations with ML development infrastructure and make informed tradeoffs across model quality, iteration speed, compute cost and operational complexity.
- Raise technical quality through hands-on implementation, design and code reviews, documentation and mentorship.
- Work with research, recommendation and ML infrastructure teams to shape technical approaches, resolve dependencies and support adoption.
- Identify and apply relevant advances from research, and contribute new methods where existing approaches fall short.
What we're looking for:
- Bachelor's in Computer Science, Machine Learning or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
- Minimum 8 years of experience building and shipping ML or AI systems, including substantial hands-on engineering and technical leadership.
- Demonstrated experience building LLM agents or other agentic AI systems for complex tasks, with a clear approach to evaluating and improving their performance.
- Strong ML fundamentals and depth in one or more relevant areas, such as applied LLMs, representation learning, recommendation systems, retrieval or ML systems.
- Experience taking research ideas into reliable production systems and evaluating their impact through meaningful experiments.
- Strong software engineering skills, including the ability to design maintainable systems, implement difficult components and conduct thorough technical reviews.
- Experience leading a substantial technical area, making decisions under ambiguity and collaborating effectively across teams.
- A track record of mentoring engineers and raising the quality of a team's technical work.
- Clear written and verbal communication, including the ability to explain technical tradeoffs to different audiences.
- A disciplined approach to using AI in your own work, including verification of generated code, analysis and conclusions.
We'll teach you our stack and our products, and we're committed to your continued growth as a technical leader. This is an individual contributor role; prior people management isn't required.
Relocation Statement:
- This position is not eligible for relocation assistance. Visit our PinFlex page to learn more about our working model.
In-Office Requirement Statement:
- We let the type of work you do guide the collaboration style. That means we're not always working in an office, but we continue to gather for key moments of collaboration and connection.
- This role will need to be in the office for in-person collaboration 1-2 times/quarter and therefore can be situated anywhere in the country.
#LI-REMOTE
#LI-DM57
Our Commitment to Inclusion:
See All 146+ Sr Staff Machine Learning Engineer Jobs in California
Find roles in California that match your experience and apply in just a few clicks.
Find JobsSr Staff Machine Learning Engineer Jobs by City in California
Where California roles are concentrated, by current openings.
Sr Staff Machine Learning Engineer Job Market in California
A snapshot from current California openings, updated as new roles post.
Who's Hiring
- Uber15
- Google15
- ServiceNow13
- Qualcomm9
- Rivian5
Top Industries Hiring
- Technology & Software27
- Artificial Intelligence4
- Science & Research3
- Electronics & Hardware3
- Biotechnology & Pharmaceuticals3
What California Employers Look For
The qualifications that appear most often in sr staff machine learning engineer jobs across California.
- PhD or Master's degree in machine learning, computer science, or a closely related field
- Ten or more years of machine learning engineering experience including senior or staff-level tenure
- Deep expertise in large-scale model training, deployment, and serving infrastructure
- Proficiency in Python and ML frameworks such as PyTorch, TensorFlow, or JAX
- Demonstrated ability to lead cross-functional research and engineering teams on production ML systems
- Experience defining technical roadmaps and mentoring staff and senior engineers across an organization
Sr Staff Machine Learning Engineer Jobs in California: Frequently Asked Questions
How do you become a sr staff machine learning engineer in California?
Reaching the sr staff level in California typically requires a graduate degree in computer science, statistics, or a related discipline combined with extensive industry experience building and shipping production ML systems. California does not issue a state license for this role, so the path is credential-free but highly competitive. Most sr staff engineers at California companies built their records through progressive roles at mid-size or large tech firms, published research, or open-source contributions that demonstrate technical leadership at scale.
How much do sr staff machine learning engineers make in California?
Sr staff machine learning 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 sr staff machine learning engineers in California?
Employers hiring sr staff machine learning engineers in California right now include Uber, Google, and ServiceNow, based on current listings on Migrate Mate as of November 2026. California's density of AI-focused companies and large technology headquarters makes it one of the few states where openings at this seniority level appear consistently throughout the year.
Which California cities have the most sr staff machine learning engineer jobs?
The cities with the most sr staff machine learning engineer openings in California are San Francisco, Mountain View, and Sunnyvale. The Bay Area's concentration of major technology headquarters drives the largest share of demand, while Los Angeles has grown significantly due to its entertainment-tech, aerospace AI, and startup ecosystems, and San Diego draws openings from its strong presence in wireless technology, biotech, and defense-adjacent AI work.
Are there remote sr staff machine learning engineer jobs in California?
Yes, and more than most fields. About 56% of sr staff machine learning engineer openings tied to California are remote or hybrid as of November 2026, reflecting how much of the role involves code, model experimentation, and design review rather than on-site lab or hardware work. The portions of the role most commonly done remotely include research, prototyping, code review, and cross-team architecture discussions.
How can I get hired as a sr staff machine learning engineer in California with little or no experience?
The most realistic entry path is through a machine learning engineer or research scientist role at a California company that operates a structured new-graduate or research residency program, such as those run by large Bay Area technology firms and AI research labs. Building a public portfolio of end-to-end ML projects, contributing to open-source frameworks, or completing a PhD with applied research gives candidates the strongest edge. Adjacent roles in data engineering, software engineering on ML infrastructure teams, or ML platform support are common lateral entry points that lead toward the sr staff track over time.
Where can I find and apply to sr staff machine learning engineer jobs in California?
You can find and apply to sr staff machine learning engineer jobs in California on Migrate Mate, which lists current California openings updated regularly. Search the listings for roles that match your specialization and experience level, then apply directly to the ones that fit.
See All 146+ Sr Staff Machine Learning Engineer Jobs in California
Find roles in California that match your experience and apply in just a few clicks.
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