Machine Learning Engineer

Orbital is an AI-first industrial company building hardware from the atoms up. Our goal is to lead an industrial renaissance to advance critical technologies and secure our planet for generations to come.

We’re starting with critical hardware for AI data centers to make them more performant and sustainable. Every Orbital product is invented with our AI platform — uniting AI-automated hardware engineering with AI-designed material science to achieve breakthrough real-world performance.

We have an ambitious mission and need excellent people in all our teams - AI research, operations, advanced materials, mechanical engineering, chemical engineering and manufacturing.

Working at Orbital means working in tightly integrated, vertically integrated teams. We’re looking for people who have a love of physical technology, curiosity in AI and a desire to learn.

As a Machine Learning Engineer at Orbital, you will architect cutting-edge AI systems for the multi-scale design of physical technologies. When we say multi-scale, we mean it: we build world-class foundation models for simulating both the microscopic motion of atoms and the macroscopic flow of liquids in 1GW data centers. We then co-design across these different scales using the ingenuity of our scientists and engineers, augmented with best-in-class domain agents.

In this role you will set exceptionally high technical standards and drive projects from prototype through to production deployment. First and foremost, we want to work with someone with a love of craftsmanship, continual learning, and building systems that scale. We also value low ego, and a genuine passion for using AI to solve major global industrial technology challenges.

Key Responsibilities

Set the technical bar and ensure engineering excellence

• Establish and maintain exceptionally high standards for code quality, system architecture and ML research and engineering practices through hands-on coding and technical review

• Design robust, well-engineered systems that others can build upon, balancing research velocity with production requirements

• Drive technical decisions on model selection, training approaches and deployment strategies

Deliver high-impact AI projects across diverse domains

• Develop and deploy AI solutions across the entire technology development pipeline- computational chemistry simulations, agentic workflows and beyond

• Rapidly upskill in new technical areas through close collaboration with domain experts (no prior chemistry or materials experience required)

• Demonstrate strong implementation skills through hands-on development, contributing significantly to the codebase

• Balance research rigour with pragmatic engineering to deliver production-ready systems at scale

Push the frontier of ML research

• Design and implement novel ML architectures for complex scientific domains, with work that meets publication standards at top-tier conferences

• Drive research projects from conception through to deployment, showing initiative and technical depth

• Engage continuously with the latest ML literature, staying current with developments in foundation models, generative AI and scientific machine learning

What We're Looking For

• Significant software engineering and ML experience, with depth in training, evaluating and deploying AI models - demonstrated through industry work

• Proven experience training, evaluating and productionising AI models at scale, with deep understanding of the full ML lifecycle from research to deployment

• Strong engineering fundamentals with the ability to write high-quality, maintainable code and architect robust systems

• A strong ability to reason about algorithms, system design, linear algebra, probabilistic concepts and ML engineering trade-offs

• An ability to debug complex machine learning systems through meticulous attention to detail, testing of edge cases and carefully selected ablations

• A genuine interest in building AI systems that enable breakthrough scientific and industrial applications

• Upon reading Hamming's You and Your Research, you resonate with quotes such as:

  • "Yes, I would like to do first-class work"

  • "You should do your job in such a fashion that others can build on top of it, so they will indeed say, 'Yes, I've stood on so and so's shoulders and I saw further.'"

  • "Instead of attacking isolated problems, I made the resolution that I would never again solve an isolated problem except as characteristic of a class"

Bonus: Experience with physics-informed or chemistry-focused AI applications. Experience building or fine-tuning large language models. Experience with agent-based systems, tool use or agentic workflows. Contributions to open-source ML projects or published research.

Orbital is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees.