Senior ML Engineer Visa Sponsorship Jobs in California
Senior ML engineer visa sponsorship jobs in California are concentrated in the Bay Area, Los Angeles, and San Diego, where companies like Google, Meta, Apple, and Nvidia actively hire and sponsor international talent. The state's density of AI research labs, hyperscalers, and well-funded startups makes it the most active market in the U.S. for this role.
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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.
Senior ML Engineer Job Roles in California
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Search Senior ML Engineer Jobs in CaliforniaSenior ML Engineer Jobs in California: Frequently Asked Questions
Which companies in California sponsor visas for senior ML engineers?
Large tech employers including Google, Meta, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, and Nvidia have well-established sponsorship programs for senior ML engineers in California. AI-focused companies like Anthropic, Scale AI, and OpenAI also sponsor regularly. Established biotech and autonomous vehicle companies in the Bay Area and San Diego are additional sources of sponsorship, particularly for engineers with specialized machine learning backgrounds.
Which visa types are most common for senior ML engineer roles in California?
The H-1B visa is the most common visa category for senior ML engineers in California, as the role consistently qualifies as a specialty occupation requiring at least a bachelor's degree in computer science, statistics, or a related field. Candidates with extraordinary recognition in machine learning research may qualify for the O-1A. Australians may pursue the E-3 visa, and Canadians and Mexicans may use the TN visa under the USMCA.
Which cities in California have the most senior ML engineer sponsorship jobs?
The San Francisco Bay Area, including San Jose, Mountain View, Menlo Park, and San Francisco itself, accounts for the largest concentration of senior ML engineer sponsorship roles in California. Los Angeles is a growing second hub, driven by entertainment tech, e-commerce, and AI startups. San Diego contributes roles through its biotech and defense tech sectors, particularly for engineers working in applied machine learning.
How to find senior ml engineer visa sponsorship jobs in California?
Migrate Mate filters job listings specifically to employers who sponsor visas, so you can search for senior ML engineer roles in California without sifting through positions that won't support international candidates. The platform is built for this use case, making it straightforward to identify active openings at companies with established sponsorship track records in California's tech and AI sectors.
Are there state-specific considerations for senior ML engineer sponsorship jobs in California?
California's prevailing wage requirements under Department of Labor rules mean employers must certify they're paying at or above the wage level for the role and location, which reflects the high cost of living in Bay Area markets. California also has strong university pipelines through UC Berkeley, Stanford, UCLA, and UC San Diego that feed ML talent into sponsoring employers, meaning competition for open roles at top companies can be significant.
What is the prevailing wage for sponsored senior 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.