Machine Learning Engineer, Trust & Safety
Vercel is hiring a Machine Learning Engineer, Trust & Safety in San Francisco, United States. It pays $208k-$312k a year and Level rates it ; you can apply on Level.
AI in this role
Build and operate production ML infrastructure and LLM systems for platform-scale abuse and threat detection.
About Vercel:
Vercel is the agentic infrastructure company, freeing people and agents to ship what's next. For more than a decade we've helped builders move from idea to production with speed, security, and exceptional developer experience.
Now we're scaling our products for both agents and people to ship and run software, built in the open and trusted by OpenAI, PayPal, Ramp, Supreme, and millions of developers worldwide.
About the Role:
We are looking for a Machine Learning Engineer on our Trust & Safety Engineering team, to build and operate the production systems that detect and stop abuse on the platform at internet scale. This is an engineering-first role, roughly 80% writing and shipping production code (services, pipelines, and infrastructure) and 20% modeling, taking detection and classification approaches from prototype to hardened systems. This is a hybrid role based in San Francisco or New York City, with three days a week in the office.
What you’ll do:
- Design, build, and operate production systems that detect and disrupt abusive behavior across the platform, with an emphasis on reliability, scalability, and observability
- Build and maintain machine learning (ML) infrastructure, including training pipelines, feature pipelines, serving infrastructure, and evaluation frameworks
- Ship large language model (LLM) and classical ML approaches for abuse detection and classification, turning prototypes into maintainable code
- Own systems end to end, from integrating a model into the platform through deployment, monitoring, and iteration
- Work with security, product, and infrastructure teams to turn abuse patterns and detection logic into production systems
What you need:
- 5+ years of software engineering experience building and operating production systems at scale
- Wrote production code in Python, plus JavaScript/TypeScript or Go
- Built and maintained ML infrastructure, such as training and serving pipelines, feature stores, or evaluation tooling
- Integrated LLMs into production systems, including prompt engineering and evaluation
Bonus if you:
- Built an open source ML tool
- Worked in the trust and safety, fraud, or abuse prevention domain
Compensation & Benefits:
- Competitive compensation package, including equity.
- Inclusive Healthcare Package.
- Learn and Grow - we provide mentorship and send you to events that help you build your network and skills.
- Flexible Time Off.
- We will provide you the gear you need to do your role, and a WFH budget for you to outfit your space as needed.
The San Francisco, CA base pay range for this role is $208,000.00 - $312,000.00. Actual salary will be based on job-related skills, experience, and location. Compensation outside of San Francisco may be adjusted based on employee location. The total compensation package may include benefits, equity-based compensation, and eligibility for a company bonus or variable pay program depending on the role. Your recruiter can share more details during the hiring process.
Disclosures:
- Privacy: Please review our Job Applicant Privacy Policy for more information on how we handle your data.
- Equal Opportunity: Vercel is committed to fostering and empowering an inclusive community within our organization. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, gender expression or identity, sexual orientation, national origin, citizenship, age, marital status, veteran status, disability status, or any other characteristic protected by law. Vercel encourages everyone to apply for our available positions, even if they don't necessarily check every box on the job description.
How we rate this
Machine Learning Engineer, Trust & Safety at Vercel rates 85 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. Open the description and count.
Prepare for this job
A free preview built only from this posting: what it asks for, what you could be asked in an interview, and how to adjust your resume.
Skills and AI tools this role asks for
Questions you could be asked
- How do you structure and test a prompt to get consistent output from a language model?
- Tell me about a project where machine learning was part of your work. What did you do?
- Tell me about a project where mlops was part of your work. What did you do?
- Tell me about a project where trust and safety was part of your work. What did you do?
- Tell me about a project where infrastructure was part of your work. What did you do?
Adapt your resume
- List these exact terms on your resume: Prompt engineering, Machine learning, MLOps, Trust And Safety, and Infrastructure. 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.
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