Machine Learning Engineer, LLM Post-Training

About NewsBreak Local life runs on local information. What happened down the street? Who can fix this? Where should we go tonight? NewsBreak started in 2015 to answer these questions, and today more than 40 million people a month rely on us to follow what’s going on in their zip code. Three platforms with one vision: powering local life. Led by founder and CEO Jeff Zheng, NewsBreak is our local life and news platform; Nearby AI connects people with local businesses; and NDot AI helps publishers and creators grow and earn. Building for the long term. A $115 million Series C made us a unicorn in 2021, and we keep investing in our people. We’re Great Place to Work® certified and named to Fast Company ’s Best Workplaces for Innovators (2025) and Fortune ’s Best Workplaces in the Bay Area™ (2026). Everyone makes an impact. Whether you write code, shape products, tell our story, or run the business, we want people who own projects end to end, stay curious, and speak up. Join us. Learn more at: NewsBreak, Nearby AI, NDot AI About the Role We are looking for a hands-on Machine Learning Engineer to drive the post-training of our large language models, with a strong emphasis on reinforcement learning (RL) . You will own the full post-training stack — continuous pre-training (CPT), supervised fine-tuning (SFT), and RL — along with the data preparation that powers it. Just as important, you will work directly with product and business teams to translate real-world use cases into concrete training objectives and ship model improvements quickly. This is a high-ownership role for someone who has actually trained models, not just read about it. Responsibilities Lead post-training of our LLMs across the full pipeline: continuous pre-training, SFT, and reinforcement learning , with RL as the primary focus (e.g., RLHF, PPO, GRPO, DPO, and related methods). Design, build, and curate the data that drives each training stage — instruction/SFT datasets, preference pairs, reward signals, on-policy rollouts, and rejection-sampled completions — and define data-preparation strategies tailored to specific business needs. Partner closely with business and product stakeholders to understand their scenarios, rapidly convert requirements into training plans, and deliver targeted model capabilities on tight timelines. Run large-scale training on mid-to-large GPU clusters , applying distributed-training techniques (data parallelism, FSDP, and where relevant tensor/pipeline parallelism) and tuning for throughput and stability. Build and maintain evaluation and reward/verifier pipelines to measure model quality, prevent regressions, and ensure training–serving consistency. Stay current with post-training research and turn promising techniques into working, production-ready code. Requirements Hands-on LLM post-training experience. You have personally run CPT, SFT, and RL training — with demonstrated, practical RL experience (RLHF / PPO / GRPO / DPO or similar), beyond just launching training scripts. Strong data engineering for ML. You can independently design data-preparation plans for a given business scenario — sourcing, cleaning, filtering, labeling strategy, and synthetic/preference data generation — to meet specific product requirements. Proven large-scale GPU training ability. You have trained LLMs on mid-to-large GPU hardware and are comfortable with distributed training and debugging at scale. Strong PyTorch fundamentals; working familiarity with frameworks such as Hugging Face TRL/Accelerate, DeepSpeed or FSDP, and inference engines like vLLM. Solid understanding of tokenization, attention, chat templates, and common failure modes in alignment/agent training. A bias toward fast iteration and business impact , with strong communication skills to work across research and product teams. Preferred Qualifications Experience designing reward models or rule-based verifiers for RL. Experience with tool-use / agentic model training (function calling, multi-step planning). Publications or open-source contributions in LLM post-training or RL. Benefits We offer a competitive benefits package: Health, dental, and vision care for you and your family (100% coverage for employee) Top-tier 401(K) plan with company matching Paid time off and paid holidays FSA, HSA and commuter benefits programs Team activity budget The US base salary range for this full-time position is listed below. Pay may vary based on a number of factors including job-related skills, level, experience, geographic location and relevant education or training. At NewsBreak, we design our overall rewards package to attract top talents. Depending on the position, the role may also be eligible for discretionary bonus and options. Your recruiter can share more details during the hiring process. Annual Base Pay Range $150,000 — $230,000 USD CPRA Privacy Notice for California Candidates