# Founding Machine Learning Engineer at Adaptive

- Company: Adaptive
- What the company does: Human security for the AI era. Adaptive unifies security awareness training, phishing simulations, agentic email security, and AI governance. Backed by a16z.
- Company website: https://www.adaptivesecurity.com
- Type: Startups (AI role)
- Level: Mid level
- Location: NYC
- Work setup: On-site
- Posted: 2026-09-02
- Apply by: 2026-10-17
- Apply: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/adaptivesecurity/547fef33-6371-4a49-9085-5810744f95b0
- Page: https://www.1752.vc/careers/jobs/adaptive-founding-machine-learning-engineer/

## About the role

Define Adaptive's ML strategy: where ML should be applied across our products, what infrastructure we need, and how we should approach build vs. buy decisions. Design and build production ML systems end-to-end — data pipelines, model training, evaluation frameworks, and inference serving.

## What they're looking for

- 4+ years of experience building ML systems in production, ideally with experience standing up the ML function at an early stage startup or as the senior or lead ML person at a previous company
- Strong software engineering fundamentals. You write production-quality code in modern languages (Python, Java, TypeScript) and work within large codebases
- Experience with cloud ML infrastructure (AWS SageMaker, Bedrock, Modal, Baseten, or similar)
- Experience with common ML and data processing frameworks (PyTorch, Tensorflow, Spark)
- Comfortable working across the stack — infrastructure, backend services, and data systems
- High autonomy. You'll have support and context from leadership, but you're expected to define the path forward and drive it

Tags: Engineering