Staff Machine Learning Engineer (ML/LLM)

Location: New York City, New York, United States

Salary: $190,000–$253,400 USD annually

Company

Databricks is a Data and AI company providing a unified platform for data, analytics, AI applications, and agents to more than 20,000 organizations worldwide.

What you will do

• Evaluate ML and LLM approaches for CustomerLake personalization use cases and continuously improve model quality.
• Inspect production model traces, understand model behavior, and tune systems based on observed performance.
• Build the platform and evaluation framework for optimizing purchases, retention, product usage, and other business outcomes.
• Identify and develop novel ML/AI personalization methods beyond incremental optimization.
• Partner with product management, engineering, and design to turn ambiguous customer problems into scalable, trustworthy solutions.
• Set the technical foundation and best practices for ML/AI personalization as the product expands.

Requirements

• 10+ years of engineering experience with a strong foundation in shipping and improving ML/AI products end to end.
• Hands-on experience building and evaluating ML models and/or LLM systems for real product or business use cases.
• Experience with customer-behavior personalization, ideally recommendations, targeting, churn, or lifetime-value modeling; transaction-based experience is acceptable.
• Proficiency in Python and modern ML frameworks such as PyTorch, with hands-on model evaluation and production AI-quality monitoring.
• Familiarity with LLMs and generative AI, including retrieval-augmented generation, prompt design, fine-tuning, and evaluation.
• Product mindset and ability to translate ambiguous customer problems into scrappy MVPs and iterate using data and user feedback.
• High ownership and bias for action in 0-to-1 environments, including pragmatic trade-offs, incomplete information, and driving projects from idea through launch and adoption.

Nice to have

• Experience in martech, ideally in a go-to-market or analytical business use case rather than a purely transactional one.
• Academic or research background that supports innovation and development of novel methods.

Culture & Benefits

• Join an early engineering team in the New York City office building CustomerLake from 0 to 1.
• Work in a small, nimble environment with the resources of an established technology leader.
• Eligibility for an annual performance bonus, equity, and regional employee benefits may be included in the total compensation package.
• Databricks is committed to an inclusive culture and equal employment opportunity.