Staff Machine Learning Engineer

primer.ai

San Francisco, CA 94199

United States

Posted July 1, 2025

{CONTRACTOR,INTERN}

Nursing

Valid until July 31, 2025

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Job Description

Pasadena, California, United States; Remote; San Francisco, California, United States; Washington, District of Columbia, United States

Primer exists to make the world a safer place. We do this by providing trusted decision-ready AI to the world's most critical organizations. Our software enables leaders, operators, and analysts to better understand the changing world around us in real time and make informed decisions when the stakes are high. Primer has offices in San Francisco, Pasadena, CA and Arlington, VA. For more information, please visit

As a Staff Machine Learning Engineer you will take the lead on building and improving our data-driven products, and seeing them through from research to production. You have deep experience with the tools of data science, from algorithms and embeddings to language models and prompt engineering. You know how to rapidly prototype but also how to scale for production, leveraging previous distributed systems experience. You’ll be constantly learning and mentoring, expanding Primer's skills across the stack and bringing in new technologies and methods to the team.

Just as important as your technical skills are your strong product sense and empathy for customers. You will partner with cross-functional teams of product managers, engineers, and other technical leaders to solve the ultimate challenge: Empowering humans with artificial intelligence tools.

Roles and Responsibilities - How You Will Make an Impact

Understand the landscape of NLP problems and help us make the strategic investments that ensure Primer’s capability and leadership in the space
Design & develop distributed architectures, libraries and systems with company-wide impact.
Work on massive datasets, integrating with features such as event and topic detection, relation extraction, summarization, entity recognition, document classification, multilingual NLP and knowledge base generation
Collaborate and influence cross-functional teams to drive our technology vision and roadmap.
Triage issues and debug/resolve by identifying sources of issues and impact on operations and quality
Improve and promote engineering best practices and design patterns across the company and motivate other engineers to follow your high standard

Relevant Skills and Experience

BS, MS or PhD degree in computer science, related field or equivalent practical experience.
10+ years as a backend software engineer, integrating and deploying ML driven functionality.
Mastery of data structures and algorithms and an ability to use them practically when implementing solutions.
Experience with machine learning algorithms and tools (e.g. Numpy, PyTorch, TensorFlow); bonus for experience with LLMs and natural language processing
Experience authoring APIs in Python or Golang
Curiosity, enthusiasm, and a love for teaching and learning

This role will consider applicants out of San Francisco, CA or Pasadena, CA or Washington, DC.

The annual cash compensation range for this position is US$180,000 to US$240,000. Final compensation will be determined based on experience and skills and may vary from the range listed above.

Primer works closely with the U.S. defense and intelligence establishment. Any offer of employment is conditioned on an applicant or employee being able to meet any applicable government contract requirements. The company may rescind any offer of employment to an applicant or terminate an employee if the applicant or employee is unable to perform the functions of the position in compliance with applicable government contracts or if an applicant or employee makes a false attestation of compliance.

What We Offer

We are a series D funded company with investors from Addition, USIT, Lux Capital, Amplify Partners, Addition Capital, Bloomberg Beta, and others. W e are intentional around building a diverse and inclusive team of subject matter experts to better advocate for the needs of our users.

We care a lot about our work and about the well being of our team. We encourage everyone to work at a sustainable pace and have a flexible vacation policy for team members to utilize, Wellness Days and 100% paid leave for parents of growing families.

We offer competitive compensation and comprehensive benefits. This includes full medical, dental, and vision coverage, fertility benefits through Carrot, mental health coverage on demand with Headspace Care+, Gympass+ Membership via Wellhub, One Medical Membership, 401(k), remote work stipends, and monthly internet allowance.

Primer is proud to be an Equal Employment Opportunity and Affirmative Action employer. We do not discriminate based upon race, religion, color, national origin, gender (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, status as a protected veteran, status as an individual with a disability, or other applicable legally protected characteristics. Please see the United States Department of Labor's EEO poster and EEO poster supplement for additional information.

If you need assistance or accommodation due to a disability, you may contact us at

Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.