AI ML Engineering Visa Sponsorship Jobs in California
California leads the country in AI and ML engineering hiring, with major employers like Google, Meta, Apple, and dozens of well-funded startups concentrated in the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, and San Diego. International candidates will find more visa sponsorship activity here than anywhere else in the United States, particularly for roles in model development, MLOps, and applied research.
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INTRODUCTION
ADVANCE YOUR CAREER. ADVANCE THE WORLD.
At AMD, we believe technology can change lives for the better. It can heal us, entertain us, and make us more connected, productive, and understanding of the world around us. And we’re looking for talent who feel the same: people who want to leave the planet better than they found it, those who don’t shy away from humanity’s challenges but are determined to help solve them.
AMD is powering the next generation of supercomputing, high-performance computing, cloud, and AI. Whether you’re designing next-gen processors, enabling AI breakthroughs, or creating go-to-market plans, every role at AMD contributes to something bigger — technology that moves the world forward.
THE ROLE
We are hiring ML Systems Research Engineers to build the reinforcement learning, inference, and evaluation infrastructure behind AI-for-engineering systems. This role focuses on the systems that let agents and models improve real engineering workflows: running many attempts, evaluating correctness, measuring performance, managing long-latency rewards, and feeding results back into model and agent improvement.
You will work across compute optimization, hardware engineering automation, verification, simulation, debugging. The emphasis is on scalable ML systems that make research practical, repeatable, and useful for production engineering teams.
THE PERSON
You are a systems-minded ML engineer or researcher who understands that model quality depends on the surrounding loop: data, tools, inference, graders, reward design, logging, and iteration speed. You can build reliable infrastructure, reason about RL and inference tradeoffs, and collaborate with scientists and applied engineers to make experiments reproducible and useful.
KEY RESPONSIBILITIES
- Build RL and inference systems for agentic engineering workflows, including job orchestration, sampling, scoring, caching, experiment tracking, and reproducible evaluation.
- Develop infrastructure for long-horizon and high-latency reward tasks where validation can take minutes to hours.
- Design staged rewards, proxy graders, sliced evaluation paths, retry strategies, and uncertainty-aware evaluation methods.
- Support optimization workflows with systems for candidate generation, benchmark execution, correctness checking, profiler feedback, reward modeling, and model-level improvement.
- Partner with AI research scientists on reward hacking research, reward shaping, metareasoning, and post-training methods for engineering tasks.
- Build scalable inference and tool-use pipelines for LLM agents that interact with compilers, profilers, simulators, formal tools, benchmark harnesses, and internal knowledge sources.
- Standardize datasets, eval definitions, run logs, leaderboards, failure taxonomies, and data collection for future training.
- Analyze experimental results and turn system behavior into actionable guidance for model, agent, tool, and reward improvements.
TECHNICAL FOCUS AREAS
- Reinforcement learning and post-training infrastructure for tool-using agents.
- Inference systems for LLMs and agents, including latency, throughput, batching, sampling, reliability, and observability.
- Evaluation systems for tasks with expensive, delayed, mixed, or sparse rewards.
- Reward design for engineering domains where correctness, performance, quality, and resource usage must be balanced.
- Distributed experimentation, job orchestration, caching, data pipelines, dashboards, and reproducible run management.
- Integration with external tools such as compilers, profilers, simulators, validation systems, benchmark harnesses, and ticketing or knowledge systems.
PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS
- Strong programming skills in Python and experience with ML frameworks such as PyTorch, JAX, TensorFlow, or similar.
- Experience building ML systems, RL infrastructure, inference services, agent frameworks, evaluation platforms, or distributed experimentation systems.
- Strong understanding of model inference, batching, sampling, latency, throughput, observability, and reliability tradeoffs.
- Ability to design experiments and evaluation pipelines with clear metrics, logs, reproducibility, and statistical discipline.
- Strong collaboration skills with AI researchers, applied engineers, infrastructure engineers, and hardware domain experts.
PREFERRED EXPERIENCE
- Experience with reinforcement learning, RLHF, GRPO, preference optimization, reward modeling, reward shaping, or post-training systems.
- Experience with LLM agents, tool-use systems, code generation, automated program repair, compiler optimization, or benchmark-driven development.
- Experience with distributed systems, job orchestration, Kubernetes, Ray, Slurm, workflow engines, data pipelines, or large-scale experiment management.
- Familiarity with GPU systems, ROCm/HIP, CUDA, profiling, kernel benchmarking, model serving, or distributed training/inference.
- Exposure to hardware engineering workflows such as design, verification, firmware, simulation, or performance analysis is a strong plus.
- Publications or shipped systems in ML systems, RL, inference optimization, AI infrastructure, or hardware/software co-design are valued.
Education
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Machine Learning, or related field, or equivalent practical experience. Master's preferred; PhD is a plus, especially with work in ML systems, reinforcement learning, distributed systems, GPU computing, or AI infrastructure.
LOCATION: Santa Clara, CA
LI-AG2
LI-Hybrid
Benefits offered are described: AMD benefits at a glance. AMD does not accept unsolicited resumes from headhunters, recruitment agencies, or fee-based recruitment services. AMD and its subsidiaries are equal opportunity, inclusive employers and will consider all applicants without regard to age, ancestry, color, marital status, medical condition, mental or physical disability, national origin, race, religion, political and/or third-party affiliation, sex, pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender identity, military or veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law. We encourage applications from all qualified candidates and will accommodate applicants’ needs under the respective laws throughout all stages of the recruitment and selection process.
AMD may use Artificial Intelligence to help screen, assess or select applicants for this position. AMD’s “Responsible AI Policy” is available here. This posting is for an existing vacancy.
AI ML Engineering Job Roles in California
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Search AI ML Engineering Jobs in CaliforniaAI ML Engineering Jobs in California: Frequently Asked Questions
Which companies sponsor visas for AI ML engineers in California?
The most active sponsors for AI ML engineering roles in California include Google, Meta, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and Nvidia, all of which have major California operations. Beyond big tech, well-funded AI-focused startups such as Anthropic, OpenAI, and Scale AI have also filed significant numbers of H-1B visa petitions for ML engineering positions. Enterprise companies in fintech, healthcare tech, and autonomous vehicles are additional sources of sponsorship.
Which visa types are most common for AI ML engineering roles in California?
The H-1B is by far the most common visa for AI ML engineers in California, given that these roles typically require a bachelor's degree or higher in computer science, mathematics, or a closely related field, satisfying the specialty occupation standard. Candidates with outstanding research records may qualify for the O-1A. Australians in the field often pursue the E-3 visa as an H-1B alternative. Some PhD-level researchers explore EB-1 or EB-2 NIW pathways for permanent residence.
Which cities in California have the most AI ML engineering sponsorship jobs?
The San Francisco Bay Area accounts for the largest share, spanning San Francisco, Mountain View, Sunnyvale, Palo Alto, and Menlo Park, where the density of AI-focused employers is unmatched. Los Angeles has grown significantly, particularly around Santa Monica and Culver City, driven by media-tech and autonomous vehicle companies. San Diego is a smaller but active market, with strengths in defense AI and biotech-adjacent machine learning roles.
How to find ai ml engineering visa sponsorship jobs in California?
Migrate Mate filters AI ML engineering jobs specifically by visa sponsorship status, so you're only seeing roles where the employer has indicated willingness to sponsor. For California, you can narrow results by city or region to focus on Bay Area, Los Angeles, or San Diego opportunities. Because the sponsorship filter removes the guesswork of cold-applying to companies that won't sponsor, it significantly shortens the job search timeline for international candidates in this field.
Are there state-specific considerations for AI ML engineers seeking sponsorship in California?
California's prevailing wage requirements under the H-1B program are among the highest in the country, reflecting the state's cost of living and competitive tech market. Employers must certify on the Labor Condition Application that the offered wage meets the prevailing wage for the specific role and location. California also has a dense university pipeline through UC Berkeley, Stanford, UCLA, and UCSD, which means many employers have established international hiring processes and are familiar with OPT-to-H-1B transitions.
What is the prevailing wage for sponsored ai ml engineering jobs in California?
U.S. employers sponsoring a visa must pay at least the prevailing wage, which is what workers in the same role, area, and experience level typically earn. The Department of Labor sets this rate to make sure companies aren't hiring foreign workers simply because they'd accept lower pay than a U.S. worker. It varies by job title, location, and experience. You can look up current prevailing wage rates for any occupation and location using the OFLC Wage Search page.