ML Engineer Visa Sponsorship Jobs in California
ML engineer visa sponsorship jobs in California sit at the center of the global AI industry, with major employers spanning San Francisco, the South Bay, and Los Angeles. Companies like Google, Meta, Apple, and a dense tier of AI-focused startups regularly sponsor H-1B visa and other work visas for qualified ML engineers across the state.
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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.
ML Engineer Job Roles in California
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Search ML Engineer Jobs in CaliforniaML Engineer Jobs in California: Frequently Asked Questions
Which companies in California sponsor visas for ML engineers?
Large technology companies with established immigration programs, including Google, Apple, Meta, Amazon Web Services, and Microsoft's Bay Area offices, consistently file H-1B petitions for ML engineers. Beyond the major players, California-based AI startups and research labs such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Scale AI have also sponsored work visas for machine learning roles in recent years.
Which visa types are most common for ML engineer roles in California?
The H-1B is the most common visa for ML engineers in California because machine learning roles at the bachelor's level and above qualify as specialty occupations. Candidates already in the U.S. on F-1 OPT, including the 24-month STEM extension, frequently use that period to secure H-1B sponsorship. O-1A visas appear less often but are an option for engineers with a documented record of significant contributions or recognition in the field.
Which cities in California have the most ML engineer visa sponsorship jobs?
The San Francisco Bay Area, including San Francisco, Sunnyvale, Mountain View, and Menlo Park, accounts for the largest share of ML engineer sponsorship activity in the state. Los Angeles has grown steadily as a secondary hub, driven by companies in media technology, autonomous vehicles, and defense AI. San Diego has a smaller but active cluster tied to biotech AI and defense contractors.
How to find ml engineer visa sponsorship jobs in California?
Migrate Mate is built specifically for international candidates seeking visa sponsorship jobs, including ML engineer roles in California. You can filter by state and role to surface companies with active sponsorship history rather than sifting through listings that may not lead to a petition. Reviewing the Department of Labor's H-1B disclosure data alongside Migrate Mate listings helps confirm which California employers have filed for similar positions recently.
Are there any California-specific considerations for ML engineers seeking visa sponsorship?
California's prevailing wage requirements under H-1B rules often reflect some of the highest wage levels in the country given the state's cost of living, meaning employers must offer competitive compensation that meets Department of Labor standards for the relevant metropolitan area. The state's large research university pipeline, particularly UC Berkeley, Stanford, and UCLA, also creates significant competition for sponsorship slots, so candidates with specialized expertise in areas like large language models or computer vision tend to stand out.
What is the prevailing wage for sponsored ml engineer 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.