Machine Learning Systems Engineer at Recruiting From Scratch
Palo Alto, CA
$200,000–$300,000from the description
Aug 12, 2026
Palo Alto, CA
Sep 24, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
A growth-stage AI company in Palo Alto is hiring an ML Systems Engineer to design, build, and optimize infrastructure for large-scale model training and inference — including GPU-accelerated workloads, distributed serving systems, and production deployment pipelines. The role sits at the intersection of ML research and systems engineering, with direct collaboration alongside researchers and founders on diffusion-based language model infrastructure. Five days per week on-site is required.
Mid level · 2+ years · San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA · Full-time
“or” means any one of them counts — you don't need all of them.
We read this from the posting text with AI. Skim the description below before ruling yourself out.
How this req sits in the market our data
Roughly 230 people in the San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA area plausibly meet what this posting asks for (software developers). range 170–360
Applicant volume Moderate — A normal amount of company. The rare requirements below are what will separate a shortlisted application from the rest.
Rare in this occupation — lead with these, and say what you built with them.
Most people in this occupation already list these. Still required — just not what gets you shortlisted.
What the occupation pays Median $217,796 (middle half $177,469–$231,052). This posting is about at that midpoint.
Estimated from BLS employment for this occupation and area, per-skill prevalence across our listing corpus, and published wage benchmarks — as of Aug 15, 2026. It is a model, not a headcount.
Why we read it this way (6)
The job title carries no seniority modifier, and the experience range of 2–5 years points to a Mid-level role despite the high compensation band and technically demanding environment.
SOC classification is a judgment call: the role is primarily software/systems engineering (building and shipping ML infrastructure code) rather than operating existing systems, which points to 15-1252; 15-1299 (Computer Occupations, All Other) is a reasonable runner-up given the specialized ML Systems Engineering framing.
A Bachelor's degree in a technical field is listed as 'preferred' and equivalent practical experience is explicitly accepted, so no hard degree requirement is set.
vLLM, TensorRT, ONNX Runtime, and SGLang are listed together as a single 'experience with ML inference systems such as…' requirement under Technical Requirements; vLLM is used as the primary skill name with the others as alternatives. TensorRT, ONNX Runtime, and SGLang are also emitted separately as preferred skills because they appear individually in the 'What You'll Do' narrative section.
Kubeflow is explicitly marked 'preferred' in the Technical Requirements section.
This posting is sourced through a recruiting/staffing firm (Recruiting from Scratch); the actual employer is an unnamed AI startup.
Read the full posting
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