Principal, Machine Learning Engineer (L5)

About this job

As a Principal, Machine Learning Engineer (L5) at Twilio in India, you will shape foundational AI and ML capabilities for the Customer Memory Team. Twilio delivers innovative communication solutions and empowers developers globally to create personalized customer experiences through a remote-first work culture. On a normal day, your work involves building new product functionalities, conducting deep-dive research into LLM orchestration and data-driven personalization, designing and executing rigorous experiments within weeks, and building scalable machine learning systems. You will bridge theoretical research with enterprise-quality software, enabling applications and AI agents to understand customer context and deliver seamless, intelligent engagement.

Responsibilities

• Build out new functionality within a fast-moving product seeing rapid adoption.
• Take nebulous ideas, design rigorous experiments, and execute them within weeks.
• Conduct deep-dive research into state-of-the-art LLM orchestration, retrieval strategies, and data-driven personalization.
• Build machine learning systems that hold up at Twilio scale.
• Rapidly acquire new technical skills in a fast-paced, high-delivery environment.
• Proactively leverage and integrate the latest AI development stacks to bypass boilerplate engineering.

Requirements

• 10+ years of applied ML/AI experience with a track record of owning technically ambitious systems end-to-end.
• Comfort operating in a 0-to-1 setting with ambiguous requirements and a strong bias for action.
• Proficiency in the Python programming language.
• Experience building cloud-based services on AWS, GCP, or Azure with high-volume data, streaming, or real-time inference paths.
• Deep expertise in the design, architecture, and deployment of production-grade ML/AI systems, including LLMs, embedding models, and vector stores.
• Strong fundamentals in statistical machine learning algorithms and transformer models.
• Ability to raise the technical bar of a team through mentorship, design reviews, and standards without formal management authority.

Good to have

• Prior experience building autonomous agents that handle multi-turn conversations and maintain long-term context.
• Strong background in predictive modeling on user behavior, including experiment design and causal methods.
• Prior experience working in a globally distributed team.

Who should apply

This role suits experienced senior machine learning professionals with over a decade of applied AI background who excel in ambiguous 0-to-1 environments. Candidates must have extensive experience designing production-grade ML systems, cloud infrastructure, and LLM orchestration. Because this is a senior principal position requiring a decade of specialized background, freshers are not eligible to apply.

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