About the Role
MasterClass is building the next generation of learning products with AI at the core. Foundation models and agentic systems are central to how we design and deliver every new product, powering intelligent, adaptive experiences that help millions of people learn from the world's best. This is not a side initiative. It is the direction of the company.
We are looking for a Staff ML Engineer to join our AI engineering team and help define and deliver these products. This role is ultimately about delivery. You will be expected to stay deeply connected to the latest research, models, and techniques, but the measure of success is shipping products that people use. You will work alongside a small, talented group of ML engineers and partner closely with product, design, and engineering leadership to shape what AI-powered learning looks like at MasterClass.
What You Will Do
- Design and build agentic AI systems that power consumer learning products, including multi-step reasoning, tool use, and orchestration architectures.
- Select and integrate foundation models (LLMs, multimodal) based on product requirements, making pragmatic trade-offs between quality, latency, cost, and safety.
- Build evaluation and observability frameworks that ensure AI product quality at scale, including automated testing, human-in-the-loop review, and production monitoring.
- Architect reliable, production-grade AI pipelines, including prompt management, context retrieval (RAG), caching, and fallback strategies.
- Collaborate with Product, Design, and Engineering to translate ambiguous product goals into well-defined technical approaches and ship features end-to-end.
- Stay deeply current with the foundation model landscape—new models, techniques, agentic frameworks, and research—and bring that knowledge to bear on product decisions.
- Mentor and elevate the AI engineering team by sharing best practices, leading design reviews, and establishing reusable patterns for agentic product development.
Requirements
- 7+ years of software engineering experience, with 3+ years focused on building products with large language models or foundation models.
- Demonstrated experience shipping consumer-facing AI products that use agentic patterns (tool use, multi-step reasoning, orchestration, planning).
- Deep working knowledge of the current foundation model ecosystem: model providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, open-source), prompt engineering, RAG architectures, evaluation frameworks, and orchestration tooling.
- Strong software engineering fundamentals: system design, API design, production observability, and the ability to write clean, maintainable code in Python.
- Track record of staying on the cutting edge—you can point to specific ways you’ve incorporated new research, models, or techniques into shipped products.
- Excellent collaboration and communication skills; experience working cross-functionally with product, design, and engineering teams.
Nice To Haves
- Experience with model fine-tuning or distillation (SFT, DPO, RLHF).
- Background in edtech, consumer media, or content platforms.
- Published research or open-source contributions in AI/ML.
- Experience with multi-agent system design or advanced orchestration frameworks.