Product ML Engineer

Requirements:

• Experience with modern language models, transformers, PyTorch, and model training and inference techniques
• Experience building or experimenting with LLM agents, tool calling, planning, retrieval, or multi-step reasoning systems
• Understanding of long-context processing, memory architectures, and methods for working within limited context windows
• Familiarity with quantization, efficient inference, and tradeoffs among model quality, latency, and compute
• Familiarity with supervised fine-tuning, reinforcement learning, distillation, or other post-training methods
• Interest in reading research, implementing new ideas, and turning research into working software
• Ability to take ownership of ambiguous problems, move quickly, and thrive in an experimental environment

Responsibilities:

• Fine-tune, distill, and optimize language models for tool use, instruction following, and complex agentic tasks
• Develop agent harnesses, tool-use architectures, planning and execution loops, and techniques to improve model capability and reliability
• Build retrieval, persistent memory, context compression, and context management systems for agents handling extended tasks and conversations
• Experiment with quantization, speculative decoding, and other inference-time techniques to improve model quality, speed, and efficiency on local hardware
• Create benchmarks and evaluations for agent capabilities, long-horizon reliability, memory, and real-world task performance
• Explore research papers, algorithms, and techniques; rapidly prototype promising ideas and integrate effective approaches into production

Technologies:

• AI
• Fine-tuning
• GitHub
• Hardware
• LLM
• Model Training
• PyTorch
• Windows

More

We are Alpaca, building a full stack of hardware, software, models, and applications to make AI something people own rather than rent. We are developing a new computer architecture intended to make frontier models viable beyond datacenters, alongside a platform of models, applications, and services. Our team is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In this role, you will help make local AI systems more capable, efficient, and reliable by bridging model capabilities with complete systems, with opportunities to explore ideas and bring improvements into products used by real people. The position is in person and pays $160,000–$180,000 per year. Benefits include dental, health, and vision insurance, a flexible schedule, and paid time off. To apply, send us your resume, GitHub profile, and examples of projects, along with a short note about your interest in Alpaca. We value what you have made, researched, designed, or shipped, and welcome applicants with unconventional backgrounds.

last updated 43 week of 2026