Machine Learning Engineer, Dataset Engineering at Inception – San Mateo, California

Description Inception creates the world’s fastest, most efficient AI models. Our Mercury model is the world’s fastest reasoning LLM and first commercially available diffusion LLM, delivering 5x greater speed and efficiency than today’s LLMs, with best-in-class quality.
We are the AI researchers and engineers behind such breakthrough AI technologies as diffusion models, flash attention, and DPO.
We seek experienced Machine Learning Engineers to shape how we collect, process, and curate the datasets that power our models. This interdisciplinary role combines engineering expertise with research insights to build scalable data pipelines, develop synthetic data generation techniques, and ensure our models are trained on high-quality, diverse datasets.
Key Responsibilities

• Develop data mixes for training LLMs, including by leveraging open source datasets, synthetically generated data, and curated human feedback
• Design and implement data pipelines for processing petabyte-scale datasets
• Build systems for web crawling, data ingestion, and real-time data processing to support model training operations
• Develop tools and frameworks for efficient data storage, retrieval, and versioning across distributed systems
• Create evaluation frameworks to measure data diversity, quality, and representativeness
• Ensure data collection adheres to privacy regulations

Qualifications

• BS/MS/PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or related field (or equivalent experience)
• 3+ years of experience building data processing pipelines at scale, particularly with AI/ML applications
• Strong proficiency in Python and experience with data processing frameworks (Apache Spark, Beam, Airflow)
• Familiarity with synthetic data generation techniques and data augmentation strategies
• Familiarity with web scraping, crawling technologies, and Common Crawl datasets
• Solid understanding of machine learning fundamentals and experience with ML frameworks (PyTorch, TensorFlow)
• Experience with SQL and NoSQL databases for managing structured and unstructured data

Preferred Skills

• Experience with large language models and understanding of tokenization, embeddings, and model architectures
• Experience managing human annotation workflows and quality control processes
• Experience with vector databases and embedding-based retrieval systems
• Knowledge of data privacy regulations and ethical AI practices
• Experience with distributed computing and large-scale data storage systems (HDFS, S3, BigQuery)

Why Join Inception

• Work with World-Class Talent: Collaborate with the inventors of diffusion models and leading AI researchers
• Shape Foundational Technology: Your decisions will influence how the next generation of AI products are built and used
• Immediate Impact: Join at the ground floor where your contributions directly shape product direction and company trajectory

Perks & Benefits

• Competitive salary and equity in a rapidly growing startup.
• Access to the latest GPU hardware and cloud resources
• Flexible vacation and paid time off (PTO).
• Health, dental, and vision insurance.
• A collaborative and inclusive culture

About UsInception creates the world’s fastest, most efficient AI models. Today’s autoregressive LLMs generate tokens sequentially, which makes them painfully slow and expensive. Inception’s diffusion-based LLMs (dLLMs) generate answers in parallel. They are 5x faster and more efficient, while delivering best-in-class quality.
Inception was co-founded by Stanford professor Stefano Ermon, who co-invented such breakthrough AI technologies as diffusion models, flash attention, and DPO, UCLA professor Aditya Grover, who co-invented node2vec, decision transformers, and d1 reasoning, and Cornell professor and Afresh co-founder Volodymyr Kuleshov, who co-invented MDLM and Block Diffusion.
We pioneered the application of diffusion to language, launching the world’s first commercially available dLLM, Mercury, in early 2025. We are currently deploying our large-scale diffusion LLMs at Fortune 500 companies. Diffusion is the technology behind today’s image and video AI, and we’re making it the standard for LLMs as well.
Our team includes engineers from Google DeepMind, Meta AI, Microsoft AI, and OpenAI. Based in Palo Alto, CA, we are backed by A-list venture capitalists, including Menlo Ventures, Mayfield, M12 (Microsoft’s venture fund), Snowflake Ventures, Databricks, and Innovation Endeavors, and by tech luminaries such as Andrew Ng, Andrej Karpathy, and Eric Schmidt.
If you are talented, innovative, and ambitious, come help us invent the future of AI.
We are an equal opportunity employer and encourage candidates of all backgrounds to apply.