Machine Learning Engineer
Clay is hiring a Machine Learning Engineer for a remote role open to applicants in United States. It pays $170k-$300k a year and Level rates it ; you can apply on Clay.
Level's read on this job
- Builds AI ●●●● is how Level rates this machine learning engineer role: the job is building AI systems.
- The posting lists this role as remote.
- Tools and skills the posting cites include OpenAI, Anthropic and fine tuning.
- Level lists 57 other open roles at Clay.
- The role was posted in the last few days.
AI in this role
AI is unleashing the biggest wave of company creation in history. Clay's mission is to be the engine those companies use to grow to their full potential.
Clay predicts the next best action for your business and then helps you take it. We started by aggregating the best data for B2B companies. Then, we built the infrastructure to run any personalized campaign on top of it, including emails, ads, landing pages, and workflows that make reps more productive. Now, we're building agents that can help grow your company for you. We're already helping thousands of customers — including Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and Visa — go to market with unique data, signals, and AI research.
In 2026, we raised a $115M Series D at $7.1B Valuation led by Wellington — and are on track to cross $200M in revenue this quarter. We also launched a $1M Scholarship fund for GTME Education.
Some things to know about us:
Our community includes 17,000+ customers, 200+ integration partners, 125+ agencies, 50+ Clay clubs, and 30k members on Slack.
Our culture is unique inside and outside of work. Our team members are also DJs, activists, writers, clowns, marathoners, skydivers, psychedelic therapists, social workers, and more.
All employees can work with world-class coaches who specialize in creativity, management, and more.
Our operating principles — including negative maintenance and non-attached action — guide our work. Read more about them here.
Read about us in the NYT, Forbes, First Round Review, and more.
Hear from our employees directly on our Glassdoor page!
Machine Learning Engineer @ ClayClay's ambition is to build a self-learning revenue engine: a product that gets smarter every time someone uses it. This means data, ML, and AI are at the heart of everything we are building. We're looking for a Machine Learning Engineer to join the Learning Team: a centralized group of MLEs and data scientists whose charter is building the intelligence engine that powers learning loops across every surface of the product.
You'll ship intelligence features at the heart of the product: systems that learn a customer's business from their data and behavior, ranking and recommendation experiences, net new 0 to 1 AI products, and the ML platform that makes all of it possible.
What You'll Do
Build learning loops into the product
Design and ship systems that allow Clay to learn and improve using user behavior and important business data. Build net-new recommendation-first experiences, from prototype through production.
Build the ML and data platform
Help stand up the infrastructure that underpins learning including data lake foundations and serving infrastructure. Evaluate new tools for their ability to accelerate our product vision. Collaborate with our data science and data platform teams to ensure we’re all using a common data language.
Make quality measurable
Build eval systems and online monitoring so learning features are trustworthy and ensure they are actually positively impacting users’ experience of Clay.
Work across product teams
The Learning Team maintains one shared roadmap serving all product teams; you'll partner with almost every product team at Clay to make their surfaces smarter.
What You'll Bring
5+ years in machine learning engineering or ML-heavy software engineering, with models and ML-powered features shipped to production
Strong engineering fundamentals: you write production-quality code and own systems
Experience with LLMs in production (prompting, evals, guardrails, fine-tuning) and/or classical ML (ranking, recommendations, propensity models)
Experience building data-intensive systems: pipelines, feature infrastructure, retrieval, serving
Pragmatic product sense — you optimize for the end user experience and business impact, and know when simple beats sophisticated
Comfort with ambiguity — much of this platform is being built from the ground up
A passion for the AI space: you stay up-to-date on the latest innovations and tools, and are excited to be at the frontier
Nice To Haves
Experience building recommendation systems, search ranking, or personalization
Experience designing eval frameworks for LLM or ML systems
Familiarity with modern data stack tools (Snowflake, dbt, Dagster) and data lake architectures
Experience in fast-moving startup environments
Why Clay
This is a rare greenfield: the Learning Team is new, its charter comes straight from company leadership, and learning loops are central to Clay's product vision. You'll define the architecture, set the standards, collaborate on the product vision, and ship the features that make Clay feel like it truly knows every customer. We value ownership, clear thinking, and work that has real impact.
How we rate this
Machine Learning Engineer at Clay rates 96 out of 100 for how much of the daily work is AI. That makes it Builds AI (AI Level 4 of 4). The level is about AI in the job, not seniority.
Builds AI. The job is building AI systems.
- ●●●● Builds AI80 to 100
- ●●●○ Works on AI60 to 79
- ●●○○ Uses AI40 to 59
- ●○○○ Little AI0 to 39
Levels come from how often the tools, models and workflows of the role are named in the posting itself. Read the description and count the AI tools, models and workflows it names.
Prepare for this job
Built from this posting and from similar jobs on Level.
Skills and AI tools this role asks for
Also common in machine learning engineer jobs at this level
Pay
- This job starts at
- $170k
- Typical machine learning engineer job
- $199k
This posting starts 15% below the typical machine learning engineer job. See machine learning engineer jobs
Questions you could be asked
- Walk me through fine-tuning a model: what data did you use, and how did you check the result?
- Tell me about a research question you investigated. What did you find?
- What are the limits of OpenAI that you've run into, and how did you work around them?
- What's a project where you used Anthropic hands-on?
- How would you decide a model or AI system is ready to ship?
Adapt your resume
- List these exact terms on your resume: Fine-tuning, AI Research, OpenAI, and Anthropic. An applicant tracking system matches the wording, not the idea.
- Attach one line of real, concrete experience to at least one of them. A tool named with nothing behind it rarely survives a human read.
- Lead with what you built, trained or shipped. This role is judged on the AI system itself, not the tools around it.
Get your CV reviewed before you apply
Send your CV and the role you want next. Your review arrives by email within 3 days.
Get new remote machine learning engineer jobs (Builds AI ●●●●) by email
One email a week, each job rated for how much AI is in the work. No recruiter spam, unsubscribe in one click.
Free.
Similar roles
Data roles that build AI, at other companies.
What kind of AI work fits you?
Answer 12 practical questions in about three minutes. Get a simple profile, the work it points to, and live roles to explore next.
Find my next step