Senior Machine Learning Engineer

Vectara provides a scalable platform to deploy your Enterprise AI Agents and AI Assistants with Accuracy, Security, and Explainability like no other solution. Our enterprise RAG Platform offers unparalleled Accuracy, Security, and Explainability by leveraging the strongest models for retrieval, embedding, reranking, an optimized LLM trained for quality, and advanced Hallucination Mitigation. We are the developers of the Hughes Hallucination Evaluation Model and Correction model, core to ensuring accuracy, quality, and responsible AI that is production-ready. These innovations have been cited in the New York Times, Visual Capitalist, and many other leading publications. This platform has allowed us to be very successful with over 100 Enterprise clients, including the likes of large US military organizations, Financial services, Healthcare, and Manufacturing.

Our founding team includes industry veterans and experts in neural information retrieval and distributed systems from Google. Join us as we pursue our mission to help the world find meaning. People at Vectara are passionate about ensuring customers take advantage of breakthroughs in applied Artificial Intelligence (AI) to solve real-world technology and business problems today. Our team is a group of unquestionable all-stars in their respective fields of computer science and business from Google, Cloudera, Splunk, MongoDB, Elastic, and more.

Role Overview:

Vectara is seeking a Senior/Staff Platform Software Engineer with strong experience in backend development and modern DevOps practices. In this role, you’ll work on building and scaling the core infrastructure that powers our retrieval-augmented generation platform. You’ll help design robust services and scalable systems, with a focus on automation, observability, reliability, and performance.

Equity and Salary Range: 

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.

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 AI Agents and RAG-as-a-service platform, working on features like agentic behavior, hallucination reduction/correction, and agent orchestration.
• 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
• Basic knowledge of training and evaluating ML models.
• 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.
• Knowledge of state of the art open source models for various tasks, such as retrieval, reranking, multi-model LLMs.
• 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

Equity and Salary Range: 

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.  

Perks and Benefits:

100% paid Medical, Dental, Vision begins on your first day! Option of Health Savings Account (HSA) or Flexible Savings Account (FSA). Generous paid time off (PTO) plus paid sick time, holidays, and company rest days. Professional development and training opportunities. Company virtual happy hours and fun team building activities and more.