Machine Learning Scientist Visa Sponsorship Jobs in California
California is the top state for machine learning scientist visa sponsorship jobs, anchored by Silicon Valley giants like Google, Meta, Apple, and NVIDIA, as well as research-driven employers across San Francisco, San Jose, Los Angeles, and San Diego. Aerospace, biotech, autonomous vehicles, and enterprise AI firms all compete for this talent.
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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.
Machine Learning Scientist Job Roles in California
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Search Machine Learning Scientist Jobs in CaliforniaMachine Learning Scientist Jobs in California: Frequently Asked Questions
Which companies sponsor visas for machine learning scientists in California?
Large technology employers including Google, Meta, Apple, NVIDIA, Microsoft, Amazon, and Salesforce regularly sponsor visas for machine learning scientists at their California offices. Beyond big tech, companies in autonomous vehicles (Waymo, Cruise), biotech (Genentech, Illumina), and enterprise AI (Databricks, Scale AI) are also active sponsors. Sponsorship patterns are visible in Department of Labor H-1B visa disclosure data.
Which visa types are most common for machine learning scientist roles in California?
The H-1B is the most common visa for machine learning scientists in California, as the role qualifies as a specialty occupation requiring at least a bachelor's degree in computer science, statistics, or a related field. Candidates with a master's or PhD may have an advantage in the H-1B lottery under the advanced degree exemption. O-1A visas are another pathway for scientists with demonstrated exceptional ability, such as published research or competitive awards.
Which cities in California have the most machine learning scientist sponsorship jobs?
The San Francisco Bay Area, including San Jose, Mountain View, Palo Alto, and Sunnyvale, concentrates the largest share of machine learning scientist sponsorship jobs in California. Los Angeles is a growing second hub, driven by entertainment tech, aerospace, and startups. San Diego also has demand, particularly from biotech and defense contractors. Remote roles based at California headquarters still require employer-level sponsorship from those offices.
How to find machine learning scientist visa sponsorship jobs in California?
Migrate Mate is built specifically for international job seekers and filters machine learning scientist roles in California by employers with a documented history of visa sponsorship. Rather than sifting through thousands of listings manually, you can browse roles where sponsorship is already confirmed, covering positions across the Bay Area, Los Angeles, and San Diego with the visa details you need upfront.
What should machine learning scientists know about California-specific hiring before applying?
California employers sponsoring H-1B workers must file a Labor Condition Application certifying the offered wage meets the prevailing wage for the San Francisco, Los Angeles, or San Diego metropolitan area, which tend to be among the highest prevailing wages in the country. Many California employers actively recruit from Stanford, UC Berkeley, UCLA, and Caltech, so candidates with research connections to those universities may have a stronger pipeline into sponsored roles.
What is the prevailing wage for sponsored machine learning scientist 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.