Senior Staff Principal Machine Learning Scientist, AI Inference & Optimization

Netskope (NASDAQ: NTSK) is a leader in modern security and networking for the cloud and AI era. We secure and accelerate cloud data and AI in real time everywhere. Thousands of customers including more than 30 of the Fortune 100 trust the Netskope One platform its Zero Trust Engine and the powerful NewEdge network to gain full visibility and control without performance trade-offs.

At Netskope our technology is driven by our greatest strength: our people. We believe that belonging powers innovation and success is both personal and organizational. We embrace differences in gender ethnicity beliefs ability and identity creating an environment where every voice is heard and respected. We empower our employees to bring their authentic selves to work grow their careers through continuous education and mentorship and lead with transparency and curiosity. Join a team where you belong where you are encouraged to be an entrepreneur and where together we continue to redefine the landscape of security.

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Positions are available at Senior Staff and above. Candidates are assessed individually and leveled according to their specific skills and background.

As a Senior Staff Machine Learning Scientist you own the inference and optimization layer that makes AI in agentic workflows fast efficient and production-grade. You fine-tune and evaluate models push latency and throughput on real hardware and build the runtime that executes bounded AI tasks validated against usage from Netskopes large customer base so you optimize where the data points not where you guess.

• High-impact ownership. You own the model layer of a net-new product that changes the performance and economics of agentic AI.
• Cutting-edge unusual stack. The hard interesting inference problems live here: quantization KV-cache and memory management sparsity fine-tuning and hardware acceleration under real-world resource constraints.
• Real scale to build against. Netskopes customer footprint gives you production signals most teams never see so you deploy validate and iterate fast.

• Build and optimize the model inference path: quantization KV-cache optimization batching and latency/memory/throughput tuning on constrained commodity hardware.
• Fine-tune and evaluate models for bounded tasks; build eval harnesses that gate a capability to release on real accuracy latency and security relevance.
• Design and grow the task execution runtime (bounded sub-agents) pushing toward dynamic task generation and context compaction.
• Drive hardware acceleration / sparsity and support for larger models as the platform matures.
• Partner with the systems and backend engineers to ship capabilities end-to-end and iterate on real production signals.

• 10 years of overall industry experience with 4 years hands-on in ML/AI (model development fine-tuning and inference optimization).
• Hands-on with fine-tuning ( quantization (GGUF/AWQ/GPTQ) and inference runtimes (vLLM/SGLang TensorRT-LLM ONNX Runtime or MLX/CoreML). On-device or edge inference experience is a strong plus.
• Strong Python; comfort reaching into C for low-level interop is a plus.
• Solid grasp of transformer internals and the levers that move real inference performance and cost: KV cache attention batching memory footprint.
• Fluency with agentic coding systems and genuine curiosity about agent harnesses like Claude Code Pi and Codex so you should already be building with them or itching to.
• Clear communication: able to distill a model or infra bottleneck into an actionable concept for cross-functional teammates.

• MS in Computer Science Machine Learning Electrical Engineering or equivalent technical degree required with a focus in AI/ML research; PhD in a related field strongly preferred.

Netskope is committed to implementing equal employment opportunities for all employees and applicants for employment. Netskope does not discriminate in employment opportunities or practices based on religion race color sex marital or veteran statues age national origin ancestry physical or mental disability medical condition sexual orientation gender identity/expression genetic information pregnancy (including childbirth lactation and related medical conditions) or any other characteristic protected by the laws or regulations of any jurisdiction in which we operate.

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The application window for this position is expected to close within 50 days. You may apply by filling out the below information or visiting ourNetskope Careers site.