ML Engineer

Vectara, Inc. is looking for an experienced engineer to join its Machine Learning team. Vectara is on a mission to provide a scalable platform for scalable enterprise-ready Generative AI, helping our customers build advanced language understanding into the next generation of software systems. Founded by an ex-co-founder of Cloudera and  veterans from Google AI and Google Search, Vectara offers RAG-as-a-service to a wide range of customers including leaders in their prospective industries. 

Job responsibilities 

• Design, prototype, research and build AI systems for Vectara.
• Train, evaluate and deploy ML models in the domains of Natural Language Processing, Information Retrieval, AI Agents, Large Language Models (LLMs) and Multimodal Large Models (MLMs). 
• Improve the quality of Vectara’s RAG-as-a-service platform, working on features like multilinguality, self-supervised learning, agentic behavior and hallucination reduction.
• Publish technical blogs, papers, and patents. 

Basic requirements

• BS/MS in Computer Science, Statistics, Electrical/Computer Engineering, Mathematics, or a related field. 
• 5+/4+ years of experience after BS/MS.
• Strong software engineering basics, we work on research but also write production code.
• Knowledge of common challenges in training ML models and solutions to them.
• Familiarity with the technical details of deep learning concepts, such as Transformers, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), mixture of experts (MoE). 
• Proficiency in data/ML libraries such as pandas, transformers, and torch.
• Hands-on experience in training ML systems end-to-end from data curation to evaluation and deployment.
• Ability to collaborate with cross-functional teams.

Preferred requirements

• PhD in Computer Science/Engineering with 1+ years of industry experience. 
• Publications in prestigious venues such as ACL, NAACL, EMNLP, NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR as a key author. 
• Experience as an ML engineer in an early-stage, high growth environment. 
• Expertise in the following areas:
• Embedding models, rerankers
• Multimodal retrieval, question answering, and reasoning
• Vector databases, BM25
• Planning and reasoning in LLMs
• Multilinguality in LLMs
• NLG Evaluation such as hallucination detection

Location requirements:  We support remote applicants from all over the US but candidates who can come to the office 3 days a week in our Palo Alto office are preferred. 

Equity and Salary:

Salary is just one component of Vectara’s employee compensation. Our full-time employees are also equity owners in the company, which although not an immediate cash component, can have positive impacts on long-term total compensation for each participating employee. We would be remiss if we didn’t highlight and celebrate our focus on engaging many of our employees in being economic co-owners of the business.

Vectara welcomes all. We value the collective wisdom of people from different backgrounds, experiences, abilities and perspectives.  We never discriminate on the basis of race, religion, national origin, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, age, or marital, veteran, or disability status. Vectara has a positive and supportive culture—we look for people who are inventive and work to be a little better every single day. We seek to be smart, humble, hardworking and, above all, curious. After all, we are on a mission to find meaning.