Lead Machine Learning Engineer Jobs in USA with Visa Sponsorship
Lead Machine Learning Engineer roles attract strong H-1B visa sponsorship activity from tech, finance, and healthcare employers. The position qualifies as a specialty occupation requiring a directly related degree, making it one of the more straightforward fits for H-1B, E-3 visa, and EB-2 green card pathways.
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About the Team
The TikTok U.S. Data Security (USDS) team is responsible for the security, integrity, and compliance of TikTok’s data within the United States. The Data Platform Team builds a scalable, reliable, cost-efficient infrastructure that ensures data integrity and empowers every business unit to win through self-service tools and scientific insights.
About the Role
We are seeking a Senior Machine Learning Engineer to join our team as a technical lead, driving the architecture and execution of our next-generation AI Risk & Compliance Intelligence Platform and Intelligent Data Agent Ecosystem. In this role, you will be instrumental in bridging the gap between standard prompt engineering and native, model-driven reasoning frameworks. You will tackle complex ML challenges around offline/online evaluation, synthetic data generation for small-sample scenarios, and automated agent skill optimizations across Data & Engineering workflows (DA/DS/DE/SRE).
Key Responsibilities
- Design, build, and scale robust LLM evaluation architecture, including automated offline datasets, metric suites, and benchmarking pipelines to measure prompt and model performance.
- Innovate on LLM-driven synthetic data generation methodologies to tackle data scarcity bottlenecks and systematically evaluate long-tail/edge-case risk scenarios.
- Advance beyond criteria-based prompt engineering by extracting deep risk patterns directly from complex case data to build native, ML-driven decision models and reasoning abstractions.
- Architect, evaluate, and continuously optimize modular agent skills and tools tailored for Data Science, Analytics, Data Engineering, and SRE workflows to maximize tool-use accuracy, execution efficiency, and task success rates.
- Implement advanced evaluation methodologies (such as LLM-as-a-judge and multi-agent benchmarking) across both risk intelligence and agentic ecosystems.
- Provide technical leadership by establishing core ML system design patterns, benchmarking standards, and engineering best practices, while translating complex operational requirements into scalable machine learning solutions across cross-functional partnerships.
Qualifications
Minimum Qualifications
- Experience: 5+ years of software/ML engineering experience with a strong track record of designing, building, and deploying ML/LLM systems in production.
- Generative AI & LLMs: Deep hands-on expertise with LLM architectures, fine-tuning, RAG, prompt tuning, and agentic frameworks.
- Evaluation & Data Bootstrapping: Demonstrated experience building robust LLM evaluation frameworks (LLM-as-a-judge, automated benchmark pipelines) and tackling data scarcity/imbalance problems.
- Core Engineering: Strong coding skills alongside production experience with scalable data processing pipelines.
Preferred Qualifications
- Prior domain experience in Risk & Compliance Intelligence and Automated Decision Systems.
- Hands-on experience with synthetic dataset generation or bootstrapping models for cold-start scenarios.
- Experience building AI tools or agents for technical personas (Data Analysts, Data Scientists, Data Engineers, Data SRE).
- Demonstrated ability to serve as a founding technical lead on ambiguous, high-impact initiative pods.
About USDS
TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC is dedicated to the safety and security of millions of Americans who create, discover, and connect with what they love on the apps we operate. The Joint Venture has been established in compliance with the Executive Order signed by President Trump on September 25, 2025. Our foundation is a comprehensive data privacy and cybersecurity program we operate under defined safeguards to protect national security and secure U.S. user data, apps and the algorithm. We safeguard the U.S. content ecosystem, holding decision-making authority for trust and safety policies and moderation. USDS Joint Venture helps ensure Americans can continue to express their creativity, discover new hobbies and interests, and build thriving communities and businesses on a global scale.
On-site presence across teams allows the company to operate with greater speed, alignment, and agility — especially in areas like real-time decision-making, team development, and integrated execution. As such, the company is shifting from a hybrid work model to a fully in-person schedule up to 5 days a week.
Why Join Us
Inspiring creativity is at the core of TikTok's mission. Our innovative product is built to help people authentically express themselves, discover and connect – and our global, diverse teams make that possible. Together, we create value for our communities, inspire creativity and bring joy – a mission we work towards every day. We strive to do great things with great people. We lead with curiosity, humility, and a desire to make impact in a rapidly growing tech company. Every challenge is an opportunity to learn and innovate as one team. We're resilient and embrace challenges as they come. By constantly iterating and fostering an "Always Day 1" mindset, we achieve meaningful breakthroughs for ourselves, our company, and our users. When we create and grow together, the possibilities are limitless. Join us.
Diversity & Inclusion
TikTok is committed to creating an inclusive space where employees are valued for their skills, experiences, and unique perspectives. Our platform connects people from across the globe and so does our workplace. At TikTok, our mission is to inspire creativity and bring joy. To achieve that goal, we are committed to celebrating our diverse voices and to creating an environment that reflects the many communities we reach. We are passionate about this and hope you are too.
USDS Reasonable Accommodation
USDS is committed to providing reasonable accommodations in our recruitment processes for candidates with disabilities, pregnancy, sincerely held religious beliefs or other reasons protected by applicable laws. If you need assistance or a reasonable accommodation, please reach out to us at https://tinyurl.com/USDS-RA
Job Information
【For Pay Transparency】Compensation Description (Annually)
The base salary range for this position in the selected city is $198360 - $416100 annually. Compensation may vary outside of this range depending on a number of factors, including a candidate’s qualifications, skills, competencies and experience, and location. Base pay is one part of the Total Package that is provided to compensate and recognize employees for their work, and this role may be eligible for additional discretionary bonuses/incentives, and restricted stock units.
Benefits may vary depending on the nature of employment and the country work location. Employees have day one access to medical, dental, and vision insurance, a 401(k) savings plan with company match, paid parental leave, short-term and long-term disability coverage, life insurance, wellbeing benefits, among others. Employees also receive 10 paid holidays per year, 10 paid sick days per year and 17 days of Paid Personal Time (prorated upon hire with increasing accruals by tenure).
The Company reserves the right to modify or change these benefits programs at any time, with or without notice.
For Los Angeles County (unincorporated) Candidates:
Qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment in accordance with all federal, state, and local laws including the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers and the California Fair Chance Act. Our company believes that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship on the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of the conditional offer of employment:
1. Interacting and occasionally having unsupervised contact with internal/external clients and/or colleagues;
2. Appropriately handling and managing confidential information including proprietary and trade secret information and access to information technology systems; and
3. Exercising sound judgment.
Responsibilities
About the Team
The TikTok U.S. Data Security (USDS) team is responsible for the security, integrity, and compliance of TikTok’s data within the United States. The Data Platform Team builds a scalable, reliable, cost-efficient infrastructure that ensures data integrity and empowers every business unit to win through self-service tools and scientific insights.
About the Role
We are seeking a Senior Machine Learning Engineer to join our team as a technical lead, driving the architecture and execution of our next-generation AI Risk & Compliance Intelligence Platform and Intelligent Data Agent Ecosystem. In this role, you will be instrumental in bridging the gap between standard prompt engineering and native, model-driven reasoning frameworks. You will tackle complex ML challenges around offline/online evaluation, synthetic data generation for small-sample scenarios, and automated agent skill optimizations across Data & Engineering workflows (DA/DS/DE/SRE).
Key Responsibilities
- Design, build, and scale robust LLM evaluation architecture, including automated offline datasets, metric suites, and benchmarking pipelines to measure prompt and model performance.
- Innovate on LLM-driven synthetic data generation methodologies to tackle data scarcity bottlenecks and systematically evaluate long-tail/edge-case risk scenarios.
- Advance beyond criteria-based prompt engineering by extracting deep risk patterns directly from complex case data to build native, ML-driven decision models and reasoning abstractions.
- Architect, evaluate, and continuously optimize modular agent skills and tools tailored for Data Science, Analytics, Data Engineering, and SRE workflows to maximize tool-use accuracy, execution efficiency, and task success rates.
- Implement advanced evaluation methodologies (such as LLM-as-a-judge and multi-agent benchmarking) across both risk intelligence and agentic ecosystems.
- Provide technical leadership by establishing core ML system design patterns, benchmarking standards, and engineering best practices, while translating complex operational requirements into scalable machine learning solutions across cross-functional partnerships.
Qualifications
Minimum Qualifications
- Experience: 5+ years of software/ML engineering experience with a strong track record of designing, building, and deploying ML/LLM systems in production.
- Generative AI & LLMs: Deep hands-on expertise with LLM architectures, fine-tuning, RAG, prompt tuning, and agentic frameworks.
- Evaluation & Data Bootstrapping: Demonstrated experience building robust LLM evaluation frameworks (LLM-as-a-judge, automated benchmark pipelines) and tackling data scarcity/imbalance problems.
- Core Engineering: Strong coding skills alongside production experience with scalable data processing pipelines.
Preferred Qualifications
- Prior domain experience in Risk & Compliance Intelligence and Automated Decision Systems.
- Hands-on experience with synthetic dataset generation or bootstrapping models for cold-start scenarios.
- Experience building AI tools or agents for technical personas (Data Analysts, Data Scientists, Data Engineers, Data SRE).
- Demonstrated ability to serve as a founding technical lead on ambiguous, high-impact initiative pods.
About USDS
TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC is dedicated to the safety and security of millions of Americans who create, discover, and connect with what they love on the apps we operate. The Joint Venture has been established in compliance with the Executive Order signed by President Trump on September 25, 2025. Our foundation is a comprehensive data privacy and cybersecurity program we operate under defined safeguards to protect national security and secure U.S. user data, apps and the algorithm. We safeguard the U.S. content ecosystem, holding decision-making authority for trust and safety policies and moderation. USDS Joint Venture helps ensure Americans can continue to express their creativity, discover new hobbies and interests, and build thriving communities and businesses on a global scale.
On-site presence across teams allows the company to operate with greater speed, alignment, and agility — especially in areas like real-time decision-making, team development, and integrated execution. As such, the company is shifting from a hybrid work model to a fully in-person schedule up to 5 days a week.
Why Join Us
Inspiring creativity is at the core of TikTok's mission. Our innovative product is built to help people authentically express themselves, discover and connect – and our global, diverse teams make that possible. Together, we create value for our communities, inspire creativity and bring joy – a mission we work towards every day. We strive to do great things with great people. We lead with curiosity, humility, and a desire to make impact in a rapidly growing tech company. Every challenge is an opportunity to learn and innovate as one team. We're resilient and embrace challenges as they come. By constantly iterating and fostering an "Always Day 1" mindset, we achieve meaningful breakthroughs for ourselves, our company, and our users. When we create and grow together, the possibilities are limitless. Join us.
Diversity & Inclusion
TikTok is committed to creating an inclusive space where employees are valued for their skills, experiences, and unique perspectives. Our platform connects people from across the globe and so does our workplace. At TikTok, our mission is to inspire creativity and bring joy. To achieve that goal, we are committed to celebrating our diverse voices and to creating an environment that reflects the many communities we reach. We are passionate about this and hope you are too.
USDS Reasonable Accommodation
USDS is committed to providing reasonable accommodations in our recruitment processes for candidates with disabilities, pregnancy, sincerely held religious beliefs or other reasons protected by applicable laws. If you need assistance or a reasonable accommodation, please reach out to us at https://tinyurl.com/USDS-RA
Job Information
【For Pay Transparency】Compensation Description (Annually)
The base salary range for this position in the selected city is $198360 - $416100 annually. Compensation may vary outside of this range depending on a number of factors, including a candidate’s qualifications, skills, competencies and experience, and location. Base pay is one part of the Total Package that is provided to compensate and recognize employees for their work, and this role may be eligible for additional discretionary bonuses/incentives, and restricted stock units.
Benefits may vary depending on the nature of employment and the country work location. Employees have day one access to medical, dental, and vision insurance, a 401(k) savings plan with company match, paid parental leave, short-term and long-term disability coverage, life insurance, wellbeing benefits, among others. Employees also receive 10 paid holidays per year, 10 paid sick days per year and 17 days of Paid Personal Time (prorated upon hire with increasing accruals by tenure).
The Company reserves the right to modify or change these benefits programs at any time, with or without notice.
For Los Angeles County (unincorporated) Candidates:
Qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment in accordance with all federal, state, and local laws including the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers and the California Fair Chance Act. Our company believes that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship on the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of the conditional offer of employment:
1. Interacting and occasionally having unsupervised contact with internal/external clients and/or colleagues;
2. Appropriately handling and managing confidential information including proprietary and trade secret information and access to information technology systems; and
3. Exercising sound judgment.
See all 464+ Lead Machine Learning Engineer Jobs
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Get Access To All JobsTips for Finding Visa Sponsorship as a Lead Machine Learning Engineer
Align your degree field exactly
USCIS scrutinizes whether your degree field directly relates to ML engineering, not just STEM broadly. A computer science or electrical engineering degree clears this cleanly; a math or physics degree needs supporting evidence linking it to your specific role duties.
Target employers with active LCA history
Use Migrate Mate to find employers who have filed Labor Condition Applications for ML engineer roles specifically. Prior LCA activity signals an established sponsorship process, faster internal approvals, and recruiters who understand the H-1B timeline.
Verify prevailing wage tier before negotiating
Lead-level ML roles often land in DOL Wage Level III or IV. Run your job location and duties through OFLC Wage Search before salary discussions so you know the floor your employer must certify on the LCA, and can negotiate above it confidently.
Distinguish your IC scope in your offer letter
Lead ML engineers often carry both individual contributor and team-lead duties. Ask your employer to specify both in the offer letter and job description. USCIS gives more weight to specialty occupation claims when the role clearly requires graduate-level ML expertise, not generalized software engineering.
Front-load your EB-2 NIW documentation early
If you're building toward a National Interest Waiver green card, start collecting publication records, model deployment impact data, and citation evidence while employed. NIW petitions for ML engineers hinge on demonstrating substantial merit to U.S. industry, and that case takes months to assemble.
File premium processing for H-1B transfers
When switching employers as an H-1B holder, your new employer should file with premium processing so USCIS adjudicates within 15 business days. You can start the new role once the petition is filed, but delayed adjudication creates status uncertainty if an RFE arrives.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does a Lead Machine Learning Engineer role qualify as a specialty occupation for H-1B purposes?
Yes. Lead ML Engineer roles require at minimum a bachelor's degree in computer science, mathematics, statistics, or a directly related field, satisfying USCIS's specialty occupation definition. Lead-level positions carrying team oversight and architectural responsibilities actually strengthen this case because the role complexity supports the argument that a specific degree is required, not merely preferred.
Which visa types realistically support sponsorship for this role?
H-1B is the most common path for ML engineers from most countries, subject to the annual cap and lottery. Australian nationals can use the E-3, which has a 10,500 annual cap that has never been exhausted and requires no lottery. Chilean and Singaporean nationals may qualify for the H-1B1 visa. All three require a Labor Condition Application and a qualifying specialty occupation degree.
How do I find employers actively sponsoring Lead ML Engineer roles?
Migrate Mate lists employers with verified LCA sponsorship history for ML engineering roles, searchable by location and seniority level. This lets you prioritize outreach toward companies that have already navigated the filing process for this specific job type, rather than approaching employers who may be unfamiliar with sponsorship requirements.
Can a master's degree in a non-CS field still support an H-1B for this role?
It depends on the field. A master's in applied mathematics, data science, or computational linguistics can support the petition if your employer's job description ties the degree's core coursework directly to ML engineering duties. A degree in a loosely related field, like general business analytics, invites an RFE. O*NET lists the typical education and knowledge requirements for this occupation, which helps frame the degree-to-role connection in the petition.
What green card pathway fits a Lead Machine Learning Engineer best?
Most lead-level ML engineers qualify for EB-2, which requires an advanced degree or exceptional ability. Those with a strong publication record, significant model deployment impact, or recognized contributions to the field may self-petition under the National Interest Waiver, skipping the PERM labor certification process. EB-3 is also available for candidates with a bachelor's degree and two or more years of experience, though priority date backlogs vary significantly by country of birth.
What is the prevailing wage requirement for sponsored Lead Machine Learning Engineer jobs?
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.