Research Engineer Visa Sponsorship Jobs in California
California leads the U.S. in research engineer hiring, with major employers including Google, Meta, Apple, NVIDIA, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory concentrated in the Bay Area, San Diego, and Los Angeles. Companies here routinely sponsor H-1B and O-1 visas for research roles across AI, semiconductors, biotech, and climate technology.
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INTRODUCTION
We’re hiring Research Engineers to join teams across Meta working at the intersection of frontier AI and real-world product impact. You’ll be embedded directly in Facebook’s ecosystem, helping reimagine core experiences and reshape how people discover content, connect with creators, and interact with each other. The work spans some of the most bold bets in applied GenAI, including:
- Building the post-training, evaluation, and serving systems that turn frontier LLMs into reliable, high-quality product experiences used by billions.
- Building a general-purpose agentic platform that powers a wide range of GenAI products across Facebook — enabling teams to ship faster, safer, and at scale.
- Building systems that enable capacity and cost optimizations through model fine-tuning, post-training and other techniques.
- Adapting and scaling these systems across Meta’s products.
WHY JOIN US
- Product LLM work at singular scale
- Your post-training decisions, evaluation frameworks, and serving architecture directly affect billions of daily interactions.
- End-to-end ownership
- We don't hand off models to a separate product team. We own the loop from training data to production behavior to measurement. The impact of your work shows up in days, not quarters.
- The problems are unsolved
- How do you evaluate open-ended conversational AI at scale? How do you fine-tune for groundedness across millions of varied creator profiles? These aren't incremental improvements, they're open research questions with immediate product consequences.
- Our team is hands-on, with high autonomy, working on critical bets
- We're deliberately keeping this team lean and experienced. You'll have outsized influence on technical direction, not just execution.
Depending on your interests and strengths, your work could span post-training pipelines (SFT, RLHF, synthetic data generation), evaluation methodology (auto-judge design, benchmark construction, human-AI calibration), production serving systems (RAG, memory, multi-modal generation), multi-agent orchestration, or E2E experience of building agentic products, all grounded in shipping to real users at scale.
AI RESEARCH ENGINEER - SOCIAL PRODUCTS (TECHNICAL LEADERSHIP) RESPONSIBILITIES:
- Contribute to the training of next-generation multimodal foundation models, advance their capabilities in understanding, generation, and grounding, and enable them for downstream product use-cases.
- Support creative data sourcing, high-quality pre/mid/post-training data curation, and scale and optimize data pipelines for multimodal large language models (LLMs).
- Lead, collaborate, and execute on research that pushes forward the state of the art in multimodal reasoning and generation research, and prioritize research that can be directly applied to Meta’s product development.
MINIMUM QUALIFICATIONS:
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, relevant technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
- Experience with large scale model training, implementing algorithms, and evaluating speech-based systems.
- 5+ YOE as an Applied AI Research Scientist or Applied AI Research Engineer.
PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS:
- PhD in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or relevant technical field.
- Experience taking ideas from research to production.
ABOUT META:
Meta builds technologies that help people connect, find communities, and grow businesses. When Facebook launched in 2004, it changed the way people connect. Apps like Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp further empowered billions around the world. Now, Meta is moving beyond 2D screens toward immersive experiences like augmented and virtual reality to help build the next evolution in social technology. People who choose to build their careers by building with us at Meta help shape a future that will take us beyond what digital connection makes possible today—beyond the constraints of screens, the limits of distance, and even the rules of physics.
Meta is proud to be an Equal Employment Opportunity and Affirmative Action employer. We do not discriminate based upon race, religion, color, national origin, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, gender expression, transgender status, sexual stereotypes, age, status as a protected veteran, status as an individual with a disability, or other applicable legally protected characteristics. We also consider qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable federal, state and local law. Meta participates in the E-Verify program in certain locations, as required by law. Please note that Meta may leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies in connection with applications for employment.
Meta is committed to providing reasonable accommodations for candidates with disabilities in our recruiting process. If you need any assistance or accommodations due to a disability, please let us know at accommodations-ext@meta.com.
COMPENSATION
- $219,000/year to $301,000/year + bonus + equity + benefits
Individual compensation is determined by skills, qualifications, experience, and location. Compensation details listed in this posting reflect the base hourly rate, monthly rate, or annual salary only, and do not include bonus, equity or sales incentives, if applicable. In addition to base compensation, Meta offers benefits. Learn more about benefits at Meta.

INTRODUCTION
We’re hiring Research Engineers to join teams across Meta working at the intersection of frontier AI and real-world product impact. You’ll be embedded directly in Facebook’s ecosystem, helping reimagine core experiences and reshape how people discover content, connect with creators, and interact with each other. The work spans some of the most bold bets in applied GenAI, including:
- Building the post-training, evaluation, and serving systems that turn frontier LLMs into reliable, high-quality product experiences used by billions.
- Building a general-purpose agentic platform that powers a wide range of GenAI products across Facebook — enabling teams to ship faster, safer, and at scale.
- Building systems that enable capacity and cost optimizations through model fine-tuning, post-training and other techniques.
- Adapting and scaling these systems across Meta’s products.
WHY JOIN US
- Product LLM work at singular scale
- Your post-training decisions, evaluation frameworks, and serving architecture directly affect billions of daily interactions.
- End-to-end ownership
- We don't hand off models to a separate product team. We own the loop from training data to production behavior to measurement. The impact of your work shows up in days, not quarters.
- The problems are unsolved
- How do you evaluate open-ended conversational AI at scale? How do you fine-tune for groundedness across millions of varied creator profiles? These aren't incremental improvements, they're open research questions with immediate product consequences.
- Our team is hands-on, with high autonomy, working on critical bets
- We're deliberately keeping this team lean and experienced. You'll have outsized influence on technical direction, not just execution.
Depending on your interests and strengths, your work could span post-training pipelines (SFT, RLHF, synthetic data generation), evaluation methodology (auto-judge design, benchmark construction, human-AI calibration), production serving systems (RAG, memory, multi-modal generation), multi-agent orchestration, or E2E experience of building agentic products, all grounded in shipping to real users at scale.
AI RESEARCH ENGINEER - SOCIAL PRODUCTS (TECHNICAL LEADERSHIP) RESPONSIBILITIES:
- Contribute to the training of next-generation multimodal foundation models, advance their capabilities in understanding, generation, and grounding, and enable them for downstream product use-cases.
- Support creative data sourcing, high-quality pre/mid/post-training data curation, and scale and optimize data pipelines for multimodal large language models (LLMs).
- Lead, collaborate, and execute on research that pushes forward the state of the art in multimodal reasoning and generation research, and prioritize research that can be directly applied to Meta’s product development.
MINIMUM QUALIFICATIONS:
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, relevant technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
- Experience with large scale model training, implementing algorithms, and evaluating speech-based systems.
- 5+ YOE as an Applied AI Research Scientist or Applied AI Research Engineer.
PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS:
- PhD in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or relevant technical field.
- Experience taking ideas from research to production.
ABOUT META:
Meta builds technologies that help people connect, find communities, and grow businesses. When Facebook launched in 2004, it changed the way people connect. Apps like Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp further empowered billions around the world. Now, Meta is moving beyond 2D screens toward immersive experiences like augmented and virtual reality to help build the next evolution in social technology. People who choose to build their careers by building with us at Meta help shape a future that will take us beyond what digital connection makes possible today—beyond the constraints of screens, the limits of distance, and even the rules of physics.
Meta is proud to be an Equal Employment Opportunity and Affirmative Action employer. We do not discriminate based upon race, religion, color, national origin, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, gender expression, transgender status, sexual stereotypes, age, status as a protected veteran, status as an individual with a disability, or other applicable legally protected characteristics. We also consider qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable federal, state and local law. Meta participates in the E-Verify program in certain locations, as required by law. Please note that Meta may leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies in connection with applications for employment.
Meta is committed to providing reasonable accommodations for candidates with disabilities in our recruiting process. If you need any assistance or accommodations due to a disability, please let us know at accommodations-ext@meta.com.
COMPENSATION
- $219,000/year to $301,000/year + bonus + equity + benefits
Individual compensation is determined by skills, qualifications, experience, and location. Compensation details listed in this posting reflect the base hourly rate, monthly rate, or annual salary only, and do not include bonus, equity or sales incentives, if applicable. In addition to base compensation, Meta offers benefits. Learn more about benefits at Meta.
Research Engineer Job Roles in California
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Search Research Engineer Jobs in CaliforniaResearch Engineer Jobs in California: Frequently Asked Questions
Which companies in California sponsor visas for research engineers?
Large technology companies such as Google, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, and NVIDIA are among the most active sponsors for research engineers in California. National laboratories including Lawrence Berkeley, Lawrence Livermore, and Sandia National Laboratories also sponsor research engineers, as do biotech firms like Genentech and Illumina in the San Diego and San Francisco Bay Area corridors. Sponsorship frequency is generally higher at companies with dedicated research divisions.
What visa types are most common for research engineer roles in California?
The H-1B is the most common visa for research engineer positions in California, as the role typically qualifies as a specialty occupation requiring at least a bachelor's degree in a relevant field such as computer science, electrical engineering, or materials science. Researchers with exceptional recognition may qualify for the O-1A. Those with advanced degrees pursuing work in the national interest sometimes pursue EB-2 NIW petitions through their employers.
Which California cities have the most research engineer visa sponsorship jobs?
The San Francisco Bay Area, including San Jose, Sunnyvale, Mountain View, and Palo Alto, has the highest concentration of research engineer sponsorship roles in California due to the density of major tech campuses and research labs. San Diego is a strong secondary market, particularly for biotech and defense-related research. Los Angeles has growing opportunities in AI, aerospace research, and university-affiliated labs at UCLA and USC.
How to find research engineer visa sponsorship jobs in California?
Migrate Mate filters research engineer jobs in California specifically by visa sponsorship availability, saving you from applying to roles that won't support international candidates. The platform surfaces positions from employers with documented sponsorship history in this role category. Searching by state and role on Migrate Mate helps you focus on California-based research engineering openings where H-1B or O-1 sponsorship is a realistic part of the hiring process.
Are there state-specific factors research engineers should know about sponsorship in California?
California's prevailing wage requirements under Department of Labor rules apply to H-1B positions statewide, and wages in the Bay Area and San Diego markets are among the highest in any U.S. metropolitan area, which affects the LCA wage level your employer must certify. Many California research engineer roles are affiliated with UC system or Stanford research pipelines, meaning candidates transitioning from OPT or CPT are a common hiring profile at these employers.
What is the prevailing wage for sponsored 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.
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