ML Research Engineer Visa Sponsorship Jobs in California
California is the top state for ML research engineer visa sponsorship, driven by a concentration of major tech employers across the San Francisco Bay Area, Silicon Valley, and Los Angeles. Companies like Google, Meta, Apple, and dozens of AI-focused startups and research labs regularly sponsor H-1B visa and O-1 visas for qualified ML research engineers.
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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 Research Engineer Job Roles in California
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Search ML Research Engineer Jobs in CaliforniaML Research Engineer Jobs in California: Frequently Asked Questions
Which companies sponsor visas for ML research engineers in California?
California's largest ML research engineer sponsors include Google DeepMind, Meta AI, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and NVIDIA, all with significant California research presence. Beyond big tech, AI-focused companies like Anthropic, OpenAI, and Waymo also file H-1B petitions for ML research roles. DOL H-1B disclosure data consistently shows California employers among the highest-volume sponsors for machine learning and AI research positions nationally.
Which visa types are most common for ML research engineer roles in California?
The H-1B is the most common visa for ML research engineers in California, as the role typically qualifies as a specialty occupation requiring at least a bachelor's degree in computer science, machine learning, or a related field. The O-1A is another pathway for researchers with published work, conference recognition, or industry awards. International students completing master's or PhD programs in California may also work under OPT or STEM OPT before transitioning to employer-sponsored status.
Which cities in California have the most ML research engineer sponsorship jobs?
The San Francisco Bay Area, including San Jose, Mountain View, Menlo Park, and San Francisco itself, accounts for the largest share of ML research engineer sponsorship activity in California. Los Angeles has grown significantly, driven by research labs, entertainment technology companies, and university-affiliated AI programs. San Diego also has a meaningful cluster, particularly in biotech-adjacent machine learning and defense research.
How to find ml research engineer visa sponsorship jobs in California?
Migrate Mate is built specifically for international job seekers and filters ML research engineer roles in California by visa sponsorship availability, saving you from manually vetting employer histories. Because ML research positions often require deep specialization, filtering by specific subfields like NLP, computer vision, or reinforcement learning helps narrow results. Migrate Mate surfaces employers with active sponsorship records, which is particularly useful in California where both large tech firms and early-stage AI startups are actively hiring.
Are there any California-specific considerations for ML research engineers seeking visa sponsorship?
California's prevailing wage requirements under DOL rules apply to H-1B petitions filed for positions in the state, and wages for ML research engineers in major California metros are among the highest Level I and Level II benchmarks in the country. Many candidates entering this field have come through PhD programs at UC Berkeley, Stanford, UCLA, or UC San Diego, which have established pipelines into sponsored research roles. California also has a dense network of university-affiliated research labs where sponsored postdoctoral or staff researcher roles are common entry points.
What is the prevailing wage for sponsored ml research 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.