Senior Machine Learning Engineer, AI Generation Engine

About SandboxAQ

SandboxAQ is a high-growth company delivering AI solutions that address some of the world's greatest challenges. The company’s Large Quantitative Models (LQMs) power advances in life sciences, financial services, navigation, cybersecurity, and other sectors.

We are a global team that is tech-focused and includes experts in AI, chemistry, cybersecurity, physics, mathematics, medicine, engineering, and other specialties. The company emerged from Alphabet Inc. as an independent, growth capital-backed company in 2022, funded by leading investors and supported by a braintrust of industry leaders.

At SandboxAQ, we’ve cultivated an environment that encourages creativity, collaboration, and impact. By investing deeply in our people, we’re building a thriving, global workforce poised to tackle the world's epic challenges. Join us to advance your career in pursuit of an inspiring mission, in a community of like-minded people who value entrepreneurialism, ownership, and transformative impact.

The Opportunity

SandboxAQ's AI Generation Engine (SAIGE) team is seeking a highly accomplished Machine Learning Engineer to take ownership of the end-to-end ML lifecycle, from initial data exploration and model development to scalable production deployment. This role is central to designing and rapidly building AI-first products that incorporate Large Quantitative Models (LQMs) and sophisticated agentic frameworks.

We are looking for a hands-on engineer who is passionate about owning the entire lifecycle of model development. This requires significant industry experience in bringing machine learning models from conception and experimentation to production and deployment in a robust, scalable manner, including (but not limited to): Data Acquisition and Curation, Infrastructure, Pre-Training, Evaluations, and Fine-Tuning. This person will be one of the founding engineers to join the SAIGE team and will be the bridge between cutting-edge AI concepts and functional, real-world MVPs.

As a Machine Learning Engineer on the SAIGE team, your primary goal will be to rapidly iterate on different potential solutions to build and evaluate new models, focusing on speed and tangible outcomes. You'll be part of a diverse team consisting of software engineers, ML experts, products managers and user experience researchers, where they will play a key role in efficient and effective enablement of the cutting-edge technologies being developed at SandboxAQ.

Key Responsibilities

• Design, construct, and manage robust data pipelines for the training, validation, and continuous retraining of Large Quantitative Models (LQMs) and agentic frameworks.
• Develop, implement, and rigorously test novel ML models and algorithms, defining appropriate metrics to ensure model performance aligns with high-level product objectives.
• Contribute to the efforts in cleaning, transforming, and engineering features from complex and large-scale datasets to optimize LQM performance and predictive accuracy.
• Conduct deep analysis of model behavior, performance, and failure modes, tuning hyper-parameters and optimizing model architecture for efficiency, speed, and accuracy in a production context.
• Collaborate closely with AI researchers, product managers, and SWEs to translate high-level business objectives into actionable ML development and deployment roadmaps.
• Champion and enforce exceptional engineering standards for code quality, system efficiency, and security in a prototyping environment.

Essential Skills & Experience

• BS in Software Engineering, Computer Science, or equivalent field of study
• 5+ years of postgraduate experience in software development
• Experience developing highly-available, performant, scalable ML systems, including large-scale data processing pipelines.
• Strong expertise in Python (including the ML stack: PyTorch, TensorFlow, JAX, NumPy, Pandas)
• Long, successful history of driving the full ML lifecycle: from initial data exploration and hypothesis testing to architecture, model training, evaluation, and production deployment.
• Deep proficiency in MLOps and software best practices, including CI/CD for ML, experiment tracking (e.g., Weights & Biases, MLflow), automated testing, and version control for both code and datasets.

Highly Desired Skills & Experience

• MS or PhD in Software Engineering, Computer Science or equivalent experience
• Financial simulation or technical experience, risk simulation
• Equivalent experience includes tech leadership in a complex space, driving technical design and execution cross-collaboratively across multiple teams and organizations
• Experience with scalable software development on cloud computing platforms (e.g., GCP, AWS)

Why Join Us?

• Competitive salary, equity and annual bonus
• 401k matching at 50% up to IRS maximum contribution
• Unlimited PTO plus a summer and winter break (one week each)
• Twelve weeks of fully paid parental leave in the US, with another 8 weeks for birthing parents
• $750 equipment, software, and office furniture budget
• $100 per month for wellness (physical or mental) and $100 for home office bills
• Top-notch medical, dental and vision insurance for you and your dependents with all premiums covered at 95% for employees
• Family Planning support (fertility, surrogacy, adoption) through Carrot

SandboxAQ Welcomes All

We are committed to fostering a culture of belonging and respect, where diverse perspectives are actively sought and valued. Our multidisciplinary environment provides ample opportunity for continuous growth - working alongside humble, empowered, and ambitious colleagues ready to tackle epic challenges.

Equal Employment Opportunity: All qualified applicants will receive consideration regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity, or Veteran status.

Accommodations: We provide reasonable accommodations for individuals with disabilities in job application procedures for open roles. If you need such an accommodation, please let a member of our Recruiting team know.

Read: Guidance for candidates on using AI Tools in interviews

Compensation: CA$119K - CA$210K