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Founding Machine Learning Engineer Jobs in Madison, WI

Bespoke Labs

Machine Learning Engineer

Madison, WI

Must-Have Skills 3+ years of ML engineering experience -- model training, fine-tuning, or post-training pipelines in research or production Strong Python and deep learning proficiency (PyTorch ...

Varsity Tutors

Machine Learning Tutor

Madison, WI · Remote

$40/hr

Deep knowledge of supervised learning, unsupervised learning, feature engineering, model selection ... Familiar with machine learning curricula and common challenges such as understanding bias-variance ...

Eliassen Group

Senior AI/ML Engineer

Madison, WI · Remote

$90 - $100/hr

Remote Our client seeks a Senior AI/ML Engineer to design and deliver cloud-native machine learning solutions on AWS. The role includes LLM orchestration, RAG pipelines, vector database integration ...

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Founding Machine Learning Engineer information

See Madison, WI salary details

$31.7K

$129.8K

$195K

How much do founding machine learning engineer jobs pay per year?

As of Jun 20, 2026, the average yearly pay for founding machine learning engineer in Madison, WI is $129,751.00, according to ZipRecruiter salary data. Most workers in this role earn between $102,300.00 and $156,200.00 per year, depending on experience, location, and employer.

What is a Founding Machine Learning Engineer?

A Founding Machine Learning Engineer is one of the first technical team members at a startup who specializes in designing, building, and deploying machine learning systems. This role involves working closely with the founders to set the technical direction, build core AI products, and establish best practices for data and model development. In addition to hands-on coding and experimentation, a Founding Machine Learning Engineer often influences product decisions and helps shape the company's engineering culture. The role typically requires a blend of deep technical expertise, startup agility, and a willingness to tackle both high-level strategy and low-level engineering tasks.

What are some unique challenges and expectations for a Founding Machine Learning Engineer in an early-stage startup?

As a Founding Machine Learning Engineer, you'll face the unique challenge of building the company's machine learning infrastructure from the ground up, often with limited resources and rapidly evolving requirements. You'll be expected to wear many hats, from designing and deploying models to setting up data pipelines and collaborating closely with product and engineering teams. Your role will also involve making critical decisions about technology stacks and best practices that will shape the company's technical direction. Additionally, you'll have significant influence on the company's culture and have ample opportunities for growth as the team expands.

What are the key skills and qualifications needed to thrive as a Founding Machine Learning Engineer, and why are they important?

To thrive as a Founding Machine Learning Engineer, you need deep expertise in machine learning algorithms, software engineering, and data science, often supported by a degree in computer science or a related field. Familiarity with tools such as Python, TensorFlow or PyTorch, cloud platforms, and experience deploying ML models in production are typically required. Strong problem-solving abilities, entrepreneurial mindset, and excellent communication skills set standout candidates apart. These skills and qualities are vital for driving innovation, building scalable solutions from scratch, and collaborating within a fast-paced startup environment.
What are popular job titles related to Founding Machine Learning Engineer jobs in Madison, WI? For Founding Machine Learning Engineer jobs in Madison, WI, the most frequently searched job titles are:
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Founding Machine Learning Engineer jobs near you

Machine Learning Engineer

Bespoke Labs

Whitewater, WI

Full-time

Posted 4 days ago

Job description

About Us

We are AI researchers and builders who understand how to curate data and RL environments that truly improve models. We curated OpenThoughts, one of the best open reasoning datasets, and have trained SOTA models such as Bespoke-MiniCheck and Bespoke-MiniChart.

We are embarked on a journey to build Environments that are entire digital worlds that can be used to push the frontier of agents.

What You'll Be Working On

You will work directly with our research team on RL environment and task creation for agent training. This means designing observation spaces, action spaces, reward signals, and success criteria for new environments — and building the infrastructure that makes world-scale RL training possible. This is a high-ownership role; you will be building novel systems, not maintaining legacy ones.

Must-Have Skills

3+ years of ML engineering experience — model training, fine-tuning, or post-training pipelines in research or production

Strong Python and deep learning proficiency (PyTorch preferred; familiar with training loops, optimizers, mixed precision)

Hands-on experience with LLM post-training — SFT, RLHF, PPO, DPO, or reward model training — and understanding of how training data quality affects model behavior

Familiarity with RL frameworks (Gymnasium, dm_env) and the ability to design or modify reward functions for agent training objectives

Experience running experiments at scale on cloud or HPC (AWS, GCP, SLURM, or Ray)

Solid understanding of evaluation methodology — held-out sets, benchmark design, avoiding train/eval contamination

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