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About This Role
Applied AI (AAI) is Meta’s organization focused on making our AI models best-in-class, starting with coding. Within AAI, the Multimedia & MultiModality team covers the multimedia domain across every modality, on both the input and the output side of a model: image, video, audio, speech and music. We work directly with research, model-training and engineering partners across MSL, TBD and FAIR. Current problems include evaluating video experiences, diagnosing multimedia model behavior, producing domain-expert agent tasks, and building the data and measurement pipelines multimodal capabilities are trained and judged against.About the roleWe are hiring a senior engineer to lead this work end to end. You will take a modality or a capability area, decide what data is worth producing and how it should be measured, and carry it from an open question through to a pipeline that runs and a measurement the org relies on.This is a multimodal role, not a text-only role. You will work across image, video, audio and speech, as model inputs and as model outputs, and the data and evaluations you own will cover media, not text alone.You will choose where the pod invests, own outcomes beyond your individual contribution, set standards other engineers build against, and raise quality without becoming the review bottleneck.
Software Engineer, Multimedia & Multimodal AI Responsibilities:
- Set technical direction for a modality or capability area.
- Determining where the team invests, what success means, and the tradeoffs behind both.
- Drive that direction across partner teams, not just inside your own.
- Design and build agentic workflows and pipelines, including human-in-the-loop and expert-in-the-loop designs, to automate data production and scale output past what manual authoring supports.
- Design and own data pipelines at scale: ingestion, filtering, pseudo-labeling and captioning with attribute classifiers, and provenance tracking for audio corpora.
- Build evaluation infrastructure: objective metrics (speaker/style similarity, codec and generator quality), human listening-test pipelines, and the correlation analysis that ties the two together.
- Improve training efficiency and reliability — distributed training, GPU utilization, codec and tokenizer retraining, experiment management.
- Reproduce and extend state-of-the-art research: implement new methods from papers into our codebases and run rigorous ablations.
- Mentor engineers on the team, contribute to hiring and onboarding, and raise the bar on evaluation and quality practice.
- Build and train generative and representation models for speech, sound, and music — including text-, audio-, and video-conditioned generation, infilling, editing, and style transfer.
Minimum Qualifications:
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, relevant technical field, or equivalent practical experience
- 8+ years of programming experience in a relevant language OR 4+ years experience with a PhD
- 3+ years building ML systems in production or research settings
- strong Python and PyTorch
- Demonstrated experience with speech, audio, or music ML - ASR, TTS, audio codecs, music information retrieval, self-supervised audio representation learning, or audio generative modeling
- Experience with large-scale data pipelines and distributed training
- Track record of translating research ideas into working, measurable systems
Preferred Qualifications:
- Publications at top venues (ICASSP, Interspeech, ISMIR, NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR) in speech, audio, or music
- Generative modeling of continuous data (diffusion / flow matching, audio or vision), and demonstrated ability to switch domains and ramp quickly
- Audio DSP depth — pitch detection, FFT, real-time signal processing
- Experience with disentangled or controllable generation (voice, emotion, style, instrumentation)
- Experience building evaluation harnesses and human-eval pipelines for generative audio
- Music domain expertise: stem separation, mixing, lyrics/vocal conditioning
- Experience designing benchmarks or evaluations for model capability, with attention to grading reliability, reproducibility and label quality
- Experience building data pipelines for image, video, audio, speech or complex media formats, including versioning, lineage and provenance
- Experience designing AI agents, orchestration, or human-in-the-loop systems
- Hands-on experience evaluating or red-teaming multimodal models, or creating the data used to improve them
- Understanding of Responsible AI practices and building quality controls into AI output
- Experience with zero-to-one work: forming a charter and standing up process while priorities are still moving
- Demonstrated ability to integrate AI tools to optimize/redesign workflows and drive measurable impact (e.g., efficiency gains, quality improvements)
- Experience adhering to and implementing responsible, ethical AI practices (e.g., risk assessment, bias mitigation, quality and accuracy reviews)
- Demonstrated ongoing AI skill development (e.g., prompt/context engineering, agent orchestration) and staying current with emerging AI technologies
About Meta:
Meta builds technologies that help people connect, find communities, and grow businesses. When Facebook launched in 2004, it changed the way people connect. Apps like Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp further empowered billions around the world. Now, Meta is moving beyond 2D screens toward immersive experiences like augmented and virtual reality to help build the next evolution in social technology. People who choose to build their careers by building with us at Meta help shape a future that will take us beyond what digital connection makes possible today—beyond the constraints of screens, the limits of distance, and even the rules of physics.
Meta is proud to be an Equal Employment Opportunity and Affirmative Action employer. We do not discriminate based upon race, religion, color, national origin, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, gender expression, transgender status, sexual stereotypes, age, status as a protected veteran, status as an individual with a disability, or other applicable legally protected characteristics. We also consider qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable federal, state and local law. Meta participates in the E-Verify program in certain locations, as required by law. Please note that Meta may leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies in connection with applications for employment.
Meta is committed to providing reasonable accommodations for candidates with disabilities in our recruiting process. If you need any assistance or accommodations due to a disability, please let us know at [email protected].
$183,997/year to $257,000/year + bonus + equity + benefits
Individual compensation is determined by skills, qualifications, experience, and location. Compensation details listed in this posting reflect the base hourly rate, monthly rate, or annual salary only, and do not include bonus, equity or sales incentives, if applicable. In addition to base compensation, Meta offers benefits. Learn more about benefits at Meta.
Salary Context
This $183K-$257K range is above the median for AI Software Engineer roles in our dataset (median: $192K across 146 roles with salary data).
Role Details
About This Role
AI Software Engineers build the applications and systems that AI models run inside. They own the API layers, data pipelines, frontend integrations, and infrastructure that turn a model into a product users interact with. Every AI company needs engineers who can build the software around the AI.
The challenge is building reliable systems around inherently unreliable components. Models are probabilistic. They'll give different answers to the same question. They hallucinate. They're slow. They're expensive. Your job is to build an application layer that handles all of this gracefully while delivering a product that users trust and enjoy.
Across the 8,943 AI roles we're tracking, AI Software Engineer positions make up 4% of the market. At Meta, this role fits into their broader AI and engineering organization.
AI Software Engineer roles are among the most numerous in the AI job market. Every company deploying AI needs software engineers who understand AI integration patterns. The demand is broad, spanning startups to enterprises, across every industry adopting AI capabilities.
What the Work Looks Like
A typical week includes: building API endpoints that serve model inference with caching and fallback logic, designing the data pipeline that feeds context to a RAG system, implementing streaming responses in the frontend, debugging a race condition in the async inference pipeline, and optimizing database queries for the vector search layer. It's full-stack engineering with AI at the center.
AI Software Engineer roles are among the most numerous in the AI job market. Every company deploying AI needs software engineers who understand AI integration patterns. The demand is broad, spanning startups to enterprises, across every industry adopting AI capabilities.
Skills Required
Full-stack engineering skills with AI integration experience. Python and TypeScript are the most common requirements. You'll need to understand API design, database architecture, and how to build reliable systems around probabilistic outputs. Experience with streaming, async processing, and caching patterns is increasingly important as real-time AI applications proliferate.
Knowledge of vector databases, embedding APIs, and LLM integration patterns (function calling, structured outputs, retry logic) differentiates AI software engineers from general software engineers. Understanding cost optimization (caching strategies, model routing, batched inference) is valuable since inference costs can dominate application economics.
Strong postings describe the product you'll be building, the AI integration patterns you'll work with, and the scale requirements. Look for companies that have existing AI features and need engineers to improve and expand them, not companies that are 'planning to add AI' someday.
Compensation Benchmarks
AI Software Engineer roles pay a median of $220,000 based on 1,448 positions with disclosed compensation. Mid-level AI roles across all categories have a median of $193,200. Disclosed range: $183K to $257K.
Across all AI roles, the market median is $213,380. Top-quartile compensation starts at $264,148. The 90th percentile reaches $319,310. For comparison, the highest-paying categories include AI Safety ($253,100) and Research Engineer ($252,000). By seniority level: Entry: $110,408; Mid: $193,200; Senior: $228,700; Director: $272,250; VP: $235,000.
Meta AI Hiring
Meta has 48 open AI roles right now. They're hiring across AI/ML Engineer, AI Safety, Research Engineer, AI Software Engineer. Positions span New York, NY, US, Santa Clara, CA, US, Menlo Park, CA, US. Compensation range: $152K - $361K.
Location Context
AI roles in New York pay a median of $221,000 across 2,878 tracked positions. That's 4% above the national median.
Career Path
Common paths into AI Software Engineer roles include Software Engineer, Full-Stack Developer, Backend Engineer.
From here, career progression typically leads toward Staff Engineer, AI Architect, Engineering Manager.
If you're a software engineer, you're already 80% there. Learn the AI integration patterns: RAG, streaming inference, function calling, structured outputs. Build a project that demonstrates you can wrap an AI model in a production-quality application with proper error handling, caching, and user experience. That's the portfolio piece that gets you hired.
What to Expect in Interviews
Technical screens look like standard software engineering interviews with an AI twist. Expect system design questions about building reliable applications around probabilistic models: handling streaming responses, implementing retry logic for API failures, and designing caching strategies for LLM outputs. Coding rounds test standard algorithms plus practical integration patterns like async processing and rate limiting.
When evaluating opportunities: Strong postings describe the product you'll be building, the AI integration patterns you'll work with, and the scale requirements. Look for companies that have existing AI features and need engineers to improve and expand them, not companies that are 'planning to add AI' someday.
AI Hiring Overview
The AI job market has 8,943 open positions tracked in our dataset. By seniority: 175 entry-level, 4,132 mid-level, 3,268 senior, and 1,368 leadership roles (Director, VP, C-Level). Remote roles make up 6% of the market (521 positions). The remaining 8,351 roles require on-site or hybrid attendance.
The market median for AI roles is $213,380. Top-quartile compensation starts at $264,148. The 90th percentile reaches $319,310. Highest-paying categories: AI Safety ($253,100 median, 57 roles); Research Engineer ($252,000 median, 419 roles); AI Engineering Manager ($251,622 median, 51 roles).
AI Software Engineer roles are among the most numerous in the AI job market. Every company deploying AI needs software engineers who understand AI integration patterns. The demand is broad, spanning startups to enterprises, across every industry adopting AI capabilities.
The AI Job Market Today
The AI job market spans 8,943 open positions across 16 role categories. The largest categories by volume: AI/ML Engineer (6,739), AI Product Manager (403), AI Software Engineer (402). 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 (175) are outnumbered by mid-level (4,132) and senior (3,268) 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 1,368 positions, representing the bottleneck between technical execution and organizational strategy.
Remote work availability sits at 6% of all AI roles (521 positions), with 8,351 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 $213,380. Top-quartile roles start at $264,148, and the 90th percentile reaches $319,310. 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 $253,100 median, while Prompt Engineer roles sit at $141,440. 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 (1,422 postings), Aws (808 postings), Azure (638 postings), Rag (555 postings), Gcp (457 postings), Pytorch (433 postings), Claude (341 postings), Kubernetes (337 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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