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About This Role
Company Overview
KLA is a global leader in diversified electronics for the semiconductor manufacturing ecosystem. Virtually every electronic device in the world is produced using our technologies. No laptop, smartphone, wearable device, voice\-controlled gadget, flexible screen, VR device or smart car would have made it into your hands without us. KLA invents systems and solutions for the manufacturing of wafers and reticles, integrated circuits, packaging, printed circuit boards and flat panel displays. The innovative ideas and devices that are advancing humanity all begin with inspiration, research and development. KLA focuses more than average on innovation and we invest 15% of sales back into R\&D. Our expert teams of physicists, engineers, data scientists and problem\-solvers work together with the world’s leading technology providers to accelerate the delivery of tomorrow’s electronic devices. Life here is exciting and our teams thrive on tackling really hard problems. There is never a dull moment with us.
Group/Division
KLA has always had a close relationship with physics and data. Our optical and electron beam inspection and measurement tools use cutting edge physics models, both for hardware design and as part of their algorithms. AI, including several traditional machine learning techniques and deep learning are routinely used to process this data to meet application requirements. The AI \& Modeling Center of Excellence was setup with the mission of advancing KLA’s traditional strengths in physics and data and providing implementation solutions for multiple KLA Inspection and Metrology products targeted at the semiconductor manufacturing industry. The AI \& Modeling Center of Excellence is part of the company’s Central Engineering organization providing product development expertise in a critical area for a wide variety KLA products. As a part of this group, you will be part of a world class team of physicists, HPC system designers, machine learning and application engineers who build cutting edge solutions for modeling complex imaging techniques and semiconductor processes. You will also work with a data scientists and AI infrastructure engineers whose mission is to build and scale machine learning based solutions for our semiconductor customers. We are looking for engineers in a few different fields. If you are passionate about Physics Modeling, High Performance Computing \- HPC (including GPU), Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Data Sciences, or cutting\-edge Cloud technologies – this is the place for you!
Job Description/Preferred Qualifications
As an AI Infrastructure Engineer, you will research, evaluate, and develop next\-generation hardware and software technologies that enable large\-scale AI and machine learning workloads across KLA. You will help design and build the infrastructure that powers model training, inference, networking, storage, data protection, and emerging agentic AI systems. This role sits at the intersection of systems engineering, AI platform development, MLOps, and DevOps, ensuring that AI teams have reliable, scalable, high\-performance infrastructure to develop, train, deploy, and operate AI solutions. You will also define and develop reference architectures and platform standards that can be embraced across KLA products and engineering organizations, enabling secure, cost\-effective, and repeatable AI infrastructure deployments.
Responsibilities
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- Design \& Build AI Infrastructure: Architect, deploy, and operate scalable, secure, and cost\-effective AI platforms, distributed training environments, and model serving systems.
- Research \& Innovation: Evaluate emerging technologies in AI infrastructure, compute, storage, networking, orchestration, and security, and develop reference designs for enterprise adoption.
- Hardware \& Software Orchestration: Bring up, integrate, and lead AI compute infrastructure while diagnosing hardware, firmware, operating system, and platform issues.
- Data \& Storage Management: Design and maintain high\-performance storage, networking, and data pipelines supporting large\-scale AI workloads.
- Performance \& Reliability: Develop observability and monitoring solutions, optimize AI workload performance, and ensure infrastructure meets reliability and availability targets.
- Security \& Compliance: Implement security\-by\-design principles including encryption, identity and access management, secrets management, and AI data security. Contribute to the architecture and implementation capabilities for protecting AI workloads, intellectual property, and sensitive data at KLA.
- Collaboration: Partner with AI researchers, data scientists, software engineers, IT, and security teams to align platform capabilities with business and product needs.
Tools you will use in the role:
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- Technical Skills : Linux administration, Kubernetes/Docker, Slurm, Ray, TensorFlow, PyTorch, GPU/TPU optimization, containerization, orchestration, and programming skills.
- Infrastructure Knowledge : High speed networking, storage systems, virtualization, and server management.
- AI/ML Integration : Understanding of model training, fine‑tuning, RAG pipelines, and agentic AI systems
- Automation \& Scripting : Bash, Python, CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure as code (IaC).
- Security : TPM\-based encryption, Kubernetes security (RBAC, OPA/Gatekeeper), container security.
Qualifications:
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- Degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or related field
- 5–8 years in systems engineering, DevOps, or ML infrastructure
- Hands‑on experience building AI/GPU cluster
Minimum Qualifications
Doctorate (Academic) Degree and 0 years related work experience; Master's Level Degree and related work experience of 3 years; Bachelor's Level Degree and related work experience of 5 years
Base Pay Range: $136,300\.00 \- $231,700\.00 Annually
Primary Location: USA\-CA\-Milpitas\-KLA
KLA’s total rewards package for employees may also include participation in performance incentive programs and eligibility for additional benefits including but not limited to: medical, dental, vision, life, and other voluntary benefits, 401(K) including company matching, employee stock purchase program (ESPP), student debt assistance, tuition reimbursement program, development and career growth opportunities and programs, financial planning benefits, wellness benefits including an employee assistance program (EAP), paid time off and paid company holidays, and family care and bonding leave.
Interns are eligible for some of the benefits listed. Our pay ranges are determined by role, level, and location. The range displayed reflects the pay for this position in the primary location identified in this posting. Actual pay depends on several factors, including state minimum pay wage rates, location, job\-related skills, experience, and relevant education level or training. We are committed to complying with all applicable federal and state minimum wage requirements where applicable. If applicable, your recruiter can share more about the specific pay range for your preferred location during the hiring process.
KLA is proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer. We will ensure that qualified individuals with disabilities are provided reasonable accommodation to participate in the job application or interview process, to perform essential job functions, and to receive other benefits and privileges of employment. Please contact us at [email protected] or at \+1\-408\-352\-2808 to request accommodation.
Be aware of potentially fraudulent job postings or suspicious recruiting activity by persons that are currently posing as KLA employees. KLA never asks for any financial compensation to be considered for an interview, to become an employee, or for equipment. Further, KLA does not work with any recruiters or third parties who charge such fees either directly or on behalf of KLA . Please ensure that you have searched KLA’s Careers website for legitimate job postings. KLA follows a recruiting process that involves multiple interviews in person or on video conferencing with our hiring managers. If you are concerned that a communication, an interview, an offer of employment, or that an employee is not legitimate, please send an email to [email protected] to confirm the person you are communicating with is an employee. We take your privacy very seriously and confidentially handle your information.
Salary Context
This $136K-$231K range is above the median for AI/ML Engineer roles in our dataset (median: $180K across 1841 roles with salary data).
View full AI/ML Engineer salary data →Role Details
About This Role
AI/ML Engineers build and deploy machine learning models in production. They work across the full ML lifecycle: data pipelines, model training, evaluation, and serving infrastructure. The role has evolved significantly over the past two years. Where ML Engineers once spent most of their time on model architecture, the job now tilts heavily toward inference optimization, cost management, and integrating LLM capabilities into existing systems. Companies want engineers who can ship production systems, and the experimenter-only role is fading fast.
Day-to-day, you're writing training pipelines, debugging data quality issues, setting up evaluation frameworks, and figuring out why your model performs differently in staging than it did on your dev set. The best ML engineers are obsessive about reproducibility and measurement. They instrument everything. They know that a model is only as good as the data feeding it and the infrastructure serving it.
Across the 3,708 AI roles we're tracking, AI/ML Engineer positions make up 70% of the market. At KLA, this role fits into their broader AI and engineering organization.
Demand for AI/ML Engineers has been strong and consistent. Unlike some AI roles that spike with hype cycles, ML engineering is a foundational need. Every company deploying AI models needs people who can keep them running, and the gap between research prototypes and production systems keeps growing.
What the Work Looks Like
A typical week might include: debugging a data pipeline that's silently dropping 3% of training examples, running A/B tests on a new model version, writing documentation for a feature flag system that lets you roll back model deployments, and reviewing a junior engineer's PR for a new evaluation metric. Meetings tend to be cross-functional since ML touches product, engineering, and data teams.
Demand for AI/ML Engineers has been strong and consistent. Unlike some AI roles that spike with hype cycles, ML engineering is a foundational need. Every company deploying AI models needs people who can keep them running, and the gap between research prototypes and production systems keeps growing.
Skills Required
Python and PyTorch dominate the requirements. Most roles expect experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and familiarity with ML frameworks like TensorFlow or JAX. RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) has become a top-3 skill requirement as companies integrate LLMs into their products. Docker and Kubernetes show up in about a third of postings, reflecting the production focus of the role.
Beyond the core stack, employers increasingly want experience with experiment tracking tools (MLflow, Weights & Biases), feature stores, and vector databases. Fine-tuning experience is valuable but less common than you'd think from reading Twitter. Most production LLM work is RAG and prompt engineering, not fine-tuning. If you have both, you're in a strong position.
Companies that are serious about AI/ML hiring tend to post specific infrastructure details in the job description: the frameworks they use, their model serving stack, their data pipeline tools. Vague postings that just say 'ML experience required' without specifics are often companies that haven't figured out what they need yet.
Compensation Benchmarks
AI/ML Engineer roles pay a median of $218,750 based on 3,817 positions with disclosed compensation. Mid-level AI roles across all categories have a median of $200,000. This role's midpoint ($184K) sits 16% below the category median. Disclosed range: $136K to $231K.
Across all AI roles, the market median is $217,500. Top-quartile compensation starts at $272,100. The 90th percentile reaches $325,000. For comparison, the highest-paying categories include AI Safety ($300,000) and Research Engineer ($280,000). By seniority level: Entry: $120,000; Mid: $200,000; Senior: $230,000; Director: $272,150; VP: $250,000.
KLA AI Hiring
KLA has 5 open AI roles right now. They're hiring across AI/ML Engineer, AI Software Engineer, Research Scientist. Positions span Milpitas, CA, US, Ann Arbor, MI, US. Compensation range: $188K - $235K.
Location Context
Across all AI roles, 14% (508 positions) offer remote work, while 3,180 require on-site attendance. Top AI hiring metros: New York (1,045 roles, $220,000 median); San Francisco (810 roles, $277,088 median); Los Angeles (397 roles, $215,000 median).
Career Path
Common paths into AI/ML Engineer roles include Data Scientist, Software Engineer, Research Engineer.
From here, career progression typically leads toward ML Architect, AI Engineering Manager, Principal ML Engineer.
The fastest path into ML engineering is through software engineering with a self-directed ML education. A CS degree helps, but production engineering skills matter more than academic credentials. Build something that works, deploy it, and measure it. That portfolio project is worth more than a Coursera certificate. For career growth, the fork comes around the senior level: go deep on technical complexity (staff/principal track) or move into managing ML teams.
What to Expect in Interviews
Expect system design questions around ML pipelines: how you'd build a training pipeline for a specific use case, handle data drift, or design A/B testing infrastructure for model deployments. Coding rounds typically involve Python, with emphasis on data manipulation (pandas, numpy) and algorithm implementation. Take-home assignments often ask you to build an end-to-end ML pipeline from raw data to deployed model.
When evaluating opportunities: Companies that are serious about AI/ML hiring tend to post specific infrastructure details in the job description: the frameworks they use, their model serving stack, their data pipeline tools. Vague postings that just say 'ML experience required' without specifics are often companies that haven't figured out what they need yet.
AI Hiring Overview
The AI job market has 3,708 open positions tracked in our dataset. By seniority: 102 entry-level, 1,705 mid-level, 1,469 senior, and 432 leadership roles (Director, VP, C-Level). Remote roles make up 14% of the market (508 positions). The remaining 3,180 roles require on-site or hybrid attendance.
The market median for AI roles is $217,500. Top-quartile compensation starts at $272,100. The 90th percentile reaches $325,000. Highest-paying categories: AI Safety ($300,000 median, 21 roles); Research Engineer ($280,000 median, 147 roles); AI Architect ($254,798 median, 67 roles).
Demand for AI/ML Engineers has been strong and consistent. Unlike some AI roles that spike with hype cycles, ML engineering is a foundational need. Every company deploying AI models needs people who can keep them running, and the gap between research prototypes and production systems keeps growing.
The AI Job Market Today
The AI job market spans 3,708 open positions across 16 role categories. The largest categories by volume: AI/ML Engineer (2,605), Data Scientist (310), AI Software Engineer (259). These three account for the majority of open positions, though smaller categories often have higher per-role compensation because of specialized skill requirements.
The seniority mix tells a story about where AI teams are in their maturity. Entry-level roles (102) are outnumbered by mid-level (1,705) and senior (1,469) positions, reflecting that most companies are past the 'build a team from scratch' phase and need experienced engineers who can ship production systems. Leadership roles (Director, VP, C-Level) total 432 positions, representing the bottleneck between technical execution and organizational strategy.
Remote work availability sits at 14% of all AI roles (508 positions), with 3,180 requiring on-site or hybrid attendance. The remote share has stabilized after the post-pandemic correction. Senior and specialized roles (Research Scientist, ML Architect) are more likely to be remote-eligible than entry-level positions, partly because experienced hires have more negotiating power and partly because these roles require less hands-on mentorship.
AI compensation is structured in clear tiers. The market median sits at $217,500. Top-quartile roles start at $272,100, and the 90th percentile reaches $325,000. These figures include base salary with disclosed compensation. Total compensation (including equity, bonuses, and sign-on) runs 20-40% higher at companies that offer those components.
Category matters for compensation. AI Safety roles lead at $300,000 median, while Prompt Engineer roles sit at $140,000. The spread between highest and lowest-paying categories reflects the premium on specialized technical skills versus broader analytical roles.
The most in-demand skills across all AI postings: Python (1,890 postings), Aws (1,103 postings), Azure (877 postings), Rag (855 postings), Gcp (631 postings), Prompt Engineering (560 postings), Pytorch (545 postings), Claude (498 postings). Python dominates, appearing in the vast majority of role descriptions regardless of category. Cloud platform experience (AWS, GCP, Azure) is the second most common requirement. The newer entrants to the top skills list (RAG, vector databases, LLM APIs) reflect the shift from traditional ML toward generative AI applications.
Frequently Asked Questions
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