Applied ML Engineer

About us

• At Sierra, we’re building a platform to enable every company in the world to build their own autonomous AI agents for everything from customer service to commerce. We are primarily an in-person company based in San Francisco, with growing offices in Atlanta and London.

• We are guided by a set of values that are at the core of our actions and define our culture: Trust, Customer Obsession, Craftsmanship, Intensity, and Family. These values are the foundation of our work, and we are committed to upholding them in everything we do.

• Our co-founders are Bret Taylor and Clay Bavor. Bret was most recently co-CEO of Salesforce, which had previously acquired the company he founded, Quip. Before founding Quip, Bret was the CTO of Facebook. Bret was one of Google's earliest product managers and one of the co-creators of Google Maps. Bret currently serves as Board Chair of OpenAI. Before founding Sierra, Clay spent 18 years at Google, where he most recently led Google Labs. Earlier, he started and led Google’s AR/VR effort, Project Starline, and Google Lens. Before that, Clay led the product and design teams for Google Workspace. 

What you’ll do

• Develop New Agent Architectures: Design, build, and ship novel agent architectures to expand their intelligence and responsiveness in real-world scenarios.

• Self-Improving Agents: Build self-improving agents using real-world interactions, customer-driven feedback and techniques including supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning.

• Voice & Speech: Work with the latest advances AI voice transcription, synthesis, and multimodal models to deliver lifelike conversations at low latency.

• Simulation & Benchmarking: Push our simulation platform to test AI agents against every real-world scenario imaginable (see 𝜏-Bench announcement and use by foundational model companies). Implement and maintain analytics, experiments, and evaluation frameworks to track model quality.

• Innovation & Exploration: Stay abreast of the latest in ML research and tooling. Propose and prototype innovative ideas to push Sierra’s product capabilities forward.

What you’ll bring

• Strong ML Background: 8+ years of experience with applied machine learning. Deep understanding of model architectures, training pipelines, and evaluation methodologies.

• Collaboration & Communication: Ability to work cross-functionally with researchers, product engineers, and product managers to help connect ML insights to engineering plans and customer value.

• High Agency: Self-motivated, proactive, and resourceful. Able to identify priorities and overcome obstacles to achieve customer impact.

• Production Experience: Demonstrated ability to deploy, optimize, and manage high-scale, robust data pipelines and production ML systems.

• Engineering Proficiency: Solid software engineering skills. Experience with Python, Go and Typescript.

Even better…

• Experience reframing problems so they can be solved with deep learning and machine learning.

• Expertise working with LLMs, transformer-based architectures, or other generative AI models.

• Background in conversational AI and voice-based interfaces.

• Leadership experience on technical projects or teams.

Our values

• Trust: We build trust with our customers with our accountability, empathy, quality, and responsiveness. We build trust in AI by making it more accessible, safe, and useful. We build trust with each other by showing up for each other professionally and personally, creating an environment that enables all of us to do our best work.

• Customer Obsession: We deeply understand our customers’ business goals and relentlessly focus on driving outcomes, not just technical milestones. Everyone at the company knows and spends time with our customers. When our customer is having an issue, we drop everything and fix it.

• Craftsmanship: We get the details right, from the words on the page to the system architecture. We have good taste. When we notice something isn’t right, we take the time to fix it. We are proud of the products we produce. We continuously self-reflect to continuously self-improve.

• Intensity: We know we don’t have the luxury of patience. We play to win. We care about our product being the best, and when it isn’t, we fix it. When we fail, we talk about it openly and without blame so we succeed the next time.

• Family: We know that balance and intensity are compatible, and we model it in our actions and processes. We are the best technology company for parents. We support and respect each other and celebrate each other’s personal and professional achievements.

What we offer

We want our benefits to reflect our values and offer the following to full-time employees in the United States:

• Flexible (Unlimited) Paid Time Off

• Medical, Dental, and Vision benefits for you and your family

• Life Insurance and Disability Benefits

• 401(k) Plan with Sierra match

• Parental Leave

• Fertility and Family Building Benefits through Carrot

• Lunch, as well as delicious snacks and coffee to keep you energized 

• Discretionary Benefit Stipend giving people the ability to spend where it matters most

• Free alphorn lessons

These benefits are further detailed in Sierra's policies and are subject to change at any time, consistent with the terms of any applicable compensation or benefits plans. Eligible full-time employees can participate in Sierra's equity plans subject to the terms of the applicable plans and policies.

Be you, with us

We're working to bring the transformative power of AI to every organization in the world. To do so, it is important to us that the diversity of our employees represents the diversity of our customers. We believe that our work and culture are better when we encourage, support, and respect different skills and experiences represented within our team. We encourage you to apply even if your experience doesn't precisely match the job description. We strive to evaluate all applicants consistently without regard to race, color, religion, gender, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, pregnancy, gender expression or identity, sexual orientation, citizenship, or any other legally protected class.