# Senior Staff / Principal Machine Learning Scientist, AI Inference & Optimization at Netskope

- Company: Netskope
- What the company does: Secure and accelerate your cloud, data, and AI everywhere. Achieve unified visibility, advanced SASE & SSE protection, and optimized performance. Backed by Accel, Lightspeed and ICONIQ.
- Company website: http://www.netskope.com
- Type: Startups (AI role)
- Level: Principal and up
- Location: Santa Clara, California, United States
- Work setup: On-site
- Posted: 2026-07-14
- Apply by: 2026-10-12
- Apply: https://www.netskope.com/company/careers/open-positions/?gh_jid=8063869
- Page: https://www.1752.vc/careers/jobs/netskope-senior-staff-principal-machine-learning-scientist-ai-inference-and-opti/

## About the role

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 Netskope’s large customer base so you optimize where the data points, not where you guess.

## What they're looking for

- 10+ years of overall industry experience , with 4+ years hands-on in ML/AI (model development, fine-tuning, and inference optimization)
- 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

Tags: AI R&D