Machine Learning Engineer Visa Sponsorship Jobs in Washington
Washington is one of the strongest states for machine learning engineer visa sponsorship, driven by Microsoft, Amazon, and Google's major presence in the Seattle metro area. Bellevue, Redmond, and Seattle collectively host some of the largest ML engineering teams in the country, with Puget Sound's tech corridor offering consistent sponsorship activity across cloud, search, and AI infrastructure roles.
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Get Access To All JobsINTRODUCTION
The Senior Principal AI Agent / ML Software Engineer is a Senior Staff-level, hands-on technical leadership role responsible for defining, building, and operating next-generation AI systems on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). This person will set architecture and engineering direction for production-grade agentic AI platforms, autonomous workflows, scalable inference infrastructure, and enterprise AI applications used in large-scale, business-critical environments.
This role requires a proven engineer who can translate ambiguous product and platform goals into durable technical strategy, lead multi-team execution without direct authority, and remain deeply hands-on in design, code, reviews, operations, and incident follow-up. The ideal candidate combines deep distributed systems experience with practical AI-native engineering, including orchestration of LLMs, tools, APIs, memory, retrieval, evaluation, guardrails, and cloud services. The expectation is to ship, scale, and operate reliable, secure, observable, and cost-aware AI platform systems while raising the technical bar for engineers across the organization.
Responsibilities
- Serve as a senior technical owner for OCI AI platform capabilities, including agent execution, inference systems, model serving, AI workflow orchestration, evaluation, and observability.
- Design, architect, and deliver scalable agentic AI systems capable of reasoning, planning, tool use, workflow execution, multi-step task orchestration, and safe human-in-the-loop escalation.
- Build production-grade services for tool calling, agent memory, context management, Model Context Protocol (MCP) integration, vector retrieval, multi-agent coordination, policy enforcement, and evaluation.
- Lead architecture across distributed services optimized for low latency, high throughput, GPU efficiency, reliability, cost, operability, and secure multi-tenant operation.
- Define service boundaries, APIs, data models, state management, consistency tradeoffs, failure modes, SLIs/SLOs, rollout strategies, and operational readiness criteria for AI platform services.
- Drive technical strategy across infrastructure, platform, security, data, and application engineering teams, converting broad goals into executable multi-quarter plans and measurable milestones.
- Integrate AI agents securely and reliably with enterprise APIs, cloud services, databases, identity systems, secrets management, and external systems.
- Establish AgentOps and LLMOps practices for tracing, monitoring, eval suites, regression testing, experimentation, safety guardrails, prompt/tool versioning, and production reliability.
- Evaluate and operationalize emerging technologies in generative AI, agentic workflows, inference optimization, long-context systems, reasoning models, AI developer tooling, and agentic-first development.
- Drive engineering excellence through code reviews, design reviews, test strategy, deployment automation, incident analysis, documentation, and AI-assisted development practices using tools such as Codex, Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, or similar systems.
- Mentor Staff and senior engineers, raise architectural standards, and influence engineering practices across OCI without requiring direct management authority.
- Own critical production outcomes, including reliability, performance, security posture, cost efficiency, and supportability for the systems delivered.
REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS
- Bachelor's, Master's, or Ph.D. in Computer Science, AI/ML, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
- 12+ years of professional software engineering experience, including significant ownership of production systems; or equivalent experience demonstrating Senior Staff / Principal-level impact.
- Proven track record as a Staff, Senior Staff, Principal, or equivalent technical leader influencing architecture and execution across multiple teams.
- Deep experience designing, building, and operating high-scale distributed systems, cloud services, infrastructure platforms, or AI/ML platform services.
- Hands-on experience with production AI systems, agentic AI applications, autonomous workflows, tool-using agents, multi-step orchestration, or multi-agent systems.
- Practical experience with orchestration frameworks such as LangGraph, LangChain, CrewAI, AutoGen, LlamaIndex, or similar ecosystems.
- Deep understanding of LLM application patterns, including prompt design, structured outputs, function/tool calling, context management, RAG, memory, tool safety, and evaluation.
- Strong programming skills in Python and ability to contribute high-quality production code, reviews, tests, and debugging in complex distributed environments.
- Strong expertise with Kubernetes, Docker, cloud-native infrastructure, service-to-service communication, scalability, fault tolerance, observability, and performance analysis.
- Experience defining SLIs/SLOs, production readiness criteria, incident response practices, monitoring, tracing, experiments, and reliability programs for AI or distributed systems.
- Strong understanding of AI safety, governance, security, and operational risks for autonomous or semi-autonomous systems, including data handling, access control, auditability, and human accountability.
- Excellent written and verbal communication, with demonstrated ability to lead technical direction, resolve ambiguity, and influence senior stakeholders.
PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS
INTRODUCTION
The Senior Principal AI Agent / ML Software Engineer is a Senior Staff-level, hands-on technical leadership role responsible for defining, building, and operating next-generation AI systems on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). This person will set architecture and engineering direction for production-grade agentic AI platforms, autonomous workflows, scalable inference infrastructure, and enterprise AI applications used in large-scale, business-critical environments.
This role requires a proven engineer who can translate ambiguous product and platform goals into durable technical strategy, lead multi-team execution without direct authority, and remain deeply hands-on in design, code, reviews, operations, and incident follow-up. The ideal candidate combines deep distributed systems experience with practical AI-native engineering, including orchestration of LLMs, tools, APIs, memory, retrieval, evaluation, guardrails, and cloud services. The expectation is to ship, scale, and operate reliable, secure, observable, and cost-aware AI platform systems while raising the technical bar for engineers across the organization.
Responsibilities
- Serve as a senior technical owner for OCI AI platform capabilities, including agent execution, inference systems, model serving, AI workflow orchestration, evaluation, and observability.
- Design, architect, and deliver scalable agentic AI systems capable of reasoning, planning, tool use, workflow execution, multi-step task orchestration, and safe human-in-the-loop escalation.
- Build production-grade services for tool calling, agent memory, context management, Model Context Protocol (MCP) integration, vector retrieval, multi-agent coordination, policy enforcement, and evaluation.
- Lead architecture across distributed services optimized for low latency, high throughput, GPU efficiency, reliability, cost, operability, and secure multi-tenant operation.
- Define service boundaries, APIs, data models, state management, consistency tradeoffs, failure modes, SLIs/SLOs, rollout strategies, and operational readiness criteria for AI platform services.
- Drive technical strategy across infrastructure, platform, security, data, and application engineering teams, converting broad goals into executable multi-quarter plans and measurable milestones.
- Integrate AI agents securely and reliably with enterprise APIs, cloud services, databases, identity systems, secrets management, and external systems.
- Establish AgentOps and LLMOps practices for tracing, monitoring, eval suites, regression testing, experimentation, safety guardrails, prompt/tool versioning, and production reliability.
- Evaluate and operationalize emerging technologies in generative AI, agentic workflows, inference optimization, long-context systems, reasoning models, AI developer tooling, and agentic-first development.
- Drive engineering excellence through code reviews, design reviews, test strategy, deployment automation, incident analysis, documentation, and AI-assisted development practices using tools such as Codex, Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, or similar systems.
- Mentor Staff and senior engineers, raise architectural standards, and influence engineering practices across OCI without requiring direct management authority.
- Own critical production outcomes, including reliability, performance, security posture, cost efficiency, and supportability for the systems delivered.
REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS
- Bachelor's, Master's, or Ph.D. in Computer Science, AI/ML, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
- 12+ years of professional software engineering experience, including significant ownership of production systems; or equivalent experience demonstrating Senior Staff / Principal-level impact.
- Proven track record as a Staff, Senior Staff, Principal, or equivalent technical leader influencing architecture and execution across multiple teams.
- Deep experience designing, building, and operating high-scale distributed systems, cloud services, infrastructure platforms, or AI/ML platform services.
- Hands-on experience with production AI systems, agentic AI applications, autonomous workflows, tool-using agents, multi-step orchestration, or multi-agent systems.
- Practical experience with orchestration frameworks such as LangGraph, LangChain, CrewAI, AutoGen, LlamaIndex, or similar ecosystems.
- Deep understanding of LLM application patterns, including prompt design, structured outputs, function/tool calling, context management, RAG, memory, tool safety, and evaluation.
- Strong programming skills in Python and ability to contribute high-quality production code, reviews, tests, and debugging in complex distributed environments.
- Strong expertise with Kubernetes, Docker, cloud-native infrastructure, service-to-service communication, scalability, fault tolerance, observability, and performance analysis.
- Experience defining SLIs/SLOs, production readiness criteria, incident response practices, monitoring, tracing, experiments, and reliability programs for AI or distributed systems.
- Strong understanding of AI safety, governance, security, and operational risks for autonomous or semi-autonomous systems, including data handling, access control, auditability, and human accountability.
- Excellent written and verbal communication, with demonstrated ability to lead technical direction, resolve ambiguity, and influence senior stakeholders.
PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS
Machine Learning Engineer Job Roles in Washington
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Search Machine Learning Engineer Jobs in WashingtonMachine Learning Engineer Jobs in Washington: Frequently Asked Questions
Which companies sponsor visas for machine learning engineers in Washington?
Microsoft in Redmond, Amazon in Seattle, and Google in Kirkland are among the most active sponsors for machine learning engineers in Washington. Apple, Meta, and Expedia also maintain significant ML teams in the greater Seattle area. Beyond the largest employers, a number of mid-size AI and cloud infrastructure companies in the Puget Sound region have established sponsorship track records for specialized ML roles.
Which visa types are most common for machine learning engineer roles in Washington?
The H-1B visa is the most common visa for machine learning engineers in Washington, as the role consistently qualifies as a specialty occupation requiring a relevant bachelor's degree or higher in computer science, statistics, or a related field. Candidates with an approved I-140 may also work under H-1B extensions beyond the six-year cap. Australians may qualify for the E-3 visa, and Canadians and Mexicans may qualify under TN visa status in applicable engineering categories.
Which cities in Washington have the most machine learning engineer sponsorship jobs?
Seattle and Redmond account for the largest share of machine learning engineer sponsorship jobs in Washington. Bellevue and Kirkland also see strong demand, particularly from Amazon's and Google's satellite offices. Smaller but growing activity exists in Bothell and Issaquah, where biotech and defense technology companies have begun expanding their applied ML teams. Most open sponsored roles are concentrated within the Seattle metropolitan area.
How to find machine learning engineer visa sponsorship jobs in Washington?
Migrate Mate filters job listings specifically by visa sponsorship availability, making it easier to identify machine learning engineer roles in Washington without sifting through postings from employers who do not sponsor. You can search by state and role type to surface positions from companies actively hiring internationally. Migrate Mate focuses exclusively on sponsored roles, which saves significant time compared to scanning general job boards where sponsorship status is rarely stated upfront.
Are there state-specific factors that affect machine learning engineer sponsorship in Washington?
Washington has no state income tax, which affects prevailing wage comparisons since federal wage benchmarks are set against local cost-of-living data for the Seattle-Bellevue-Tacoma metro area. The University of Washington in Seattle produces a large pipeline of ML talent that major employers are already set up to sponsor. Washington's concentration of large tech employers also means many companies have established in-house immigration teams, which can simplify and accelerate the sponsorship process compared to employers doing it for the first time.
What is the prevailing wage for sponsored machine learning engineer jobs in Washington?
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.