Principal Machine Learning Engineer – LLM Fine-tuning, Optimization

Airbnb

Principal Machine Learning Engineer fine-tuning LLMs and optimizing models at Airbnb. Collaborating with cross-functional teams in AI products development.

Posted 5/25/2026full-timeRemote • 🇺🇸 United StatesLead💰 $292,000 - $365,000 per yearWebsite

Tech Stack

Tools & technologies

PythonPyTorch

About the role

Key responsibilities & impact

Fine-tune state-of-the-art LLMs for diverse use cases while optimizing models.
Partner with product managers, software engineers, data scientists and operation teams.
Brainstorm, design and develop AI products like AI Assistant and Autonomous agent.
Work with large scale structured and unstructured data to continuously improve foundation models.
Create a multi-year tech roadmap for the team.
Continuously evaluate foundational models for enhanced performance and efficiency.
Hands-on prototype, develop and productionize LLM models and pipelines.
Drive AI architectural decisions and contribute to ML platform architecture.

Requirements

What you’ll need

PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Mathematics, Statistics, or related technical field.
10+ years of experience with developing machine learning models and products at scale from inception to business impact.
Programming experience in Python and hands-on experience with frameworks such as PyTorch.
Proven record of training, fine tuning, optimizing models and inference run-time
Post-training experience in areas like data processing for fine-tuning; responsible LLMs; LLM alignment; reinforcement learning; efficient training and inference; language model evaluation; and/or multilingual and multimodal modeling.
Or specialized experience in runtime optimizations, model quantization, compression, on-device inference, GPU inference, pytorch, kernel development.

Benefits

Comp & perks

Bonus
Equity
Employee Travel Credits

ATS Keywords

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Applicant Tracking System Keywords

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Hard Skills & Tools

machine learningLLM fine-tuningmodel optimizationdata processingreinforcement learningmodel evaluationruntime optimizationmodel quantizationon-device inferenceGPU inference

Soft Skills

collaborationbrainstormingdesigndevelopmentevaluationarchitectural decision-making

Certifications

PhD in Computer SciencePhD in Machine LearningPhD in MathematicsPhD in Statistics