ML Software Engineer Visa Sponsorship Jobs in California
California leads the country for ML software engineer visa sponsorship jobs, with major employers like Google, Meta, Apple, and dozens of AI-focused startups concentrated in the Bay Area, Los Angeles, and San Diego. The state's deep university pipeline from UC Berkeley, Stanford, and UCLA feeds consistent demand for international ML talent across research and production engineering roles.
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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 Software Engineer Job Roles in California
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Search ML Software Engineer Jobs in CaliforniaML Software Engineer Jobs in California: Frequently Asked Questions
Which companies sponsor visas for ML software engineers in California?
Large technology companies headquartered in California, including Google, Apple, Meta, and NVIDIA, are among the most active sponsors for ML software engineer roles. Beyond the major players, a significant number of AI-focused startups and mid-sized companies in the Bay Area and Los Angeles regularly file H-1B visa petitions for ML engineers. DOL disclosure data consistently shows California employers among the highest-volume H-1B filers for machine learning and AI-related job titles.
Which visa types are most common for ML software engineer roles in California?
The H-1B is the most common visa for ML software engineers in California, as the role typically qualifies as a specialty occupation requiring a bachelor's degree or higher in computer science, statistics, or a closely related field. Candidates with extraordinary recognition in ML research may pursue the O-1A. Those completing degrees at California universities may first work under OPT or STEM OPT, which provides up to three years of work authorization before transitioning to employer-sponsored status.
Which cities in California have the most ML software engineer sponsorship jobs?
The San Francisco Bay Area, encompassing San Francisco, San Jose, Mountain View, Palo Alto, and Sunnyvale, concentrates the largest share of ML software engineer sponsorship jobs in California. Los Angeles has grown significantly as a second hub, driven by entertainment technology, autonomous vehicle research, and a maturing startup ecosystem. San Diego also has a presence, particularly tied to biotech and defense-adjacent ML applications.
How to find ml software engineer visa sponsorship jobs in California?
Migrate Mate is built specifically for international job seekers and filters ML software engineer roles in California by visa sponsorship availability, saving you from sorting through positions at companies unlikely to sponsor. Because California's ML hiring spans both large tech employers and early-stage startups, Migrate Mate helps you identify which companies have an active sponsorship track record rather than relying on job descriptions that rarely confirm sponsorship status upfront.
Are there any California-specific considerations for ML software engineers seeking visa sponsorship?
California's high prevailing wage determinations, set by the Department of Labor, reflect the state's elevated cost of living and competitive compensation norms, meaning employers must meet higher certified wage thresholds for ML engineering roles here than in most other states. California also has some of the country's strongest employee protection laws, which can affect how employment contracts and non-compete clauses are structured. The state's dense university pipeline from institutions like UC Berkeley, Stanford, and UCLA means international students on STEM OPT often transition directly into sponsored roles with California employers.
What is the prevailing wage for sponsored ml software 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.