AI/ML Engineer - Santa Clara, CA, United States
$184,000 - $253,000 USD yearly
Originally posted 28 October 2026 by the employer.
About the role
Applied Materials is hiring an AI/ML Engineer for the AI COE team to design, develop, and deploy production AI solutions for semiconductor manufacturing. A key focus is using reinforcement learning to optimize dynamic manufacturing decisions such as scheduling, dispatching, planning, and resource allocation.
What you'll do
- Design, train, evaluate, and deploy machine learning and deep learning models. - Develop reinforcement learning solutions for complex decision-making and optimization problems, building RL environments, reward functions, policies, and evaluation frameworks. - Train and optimize agents using simulation and operational data, exploring techniques such as policy optimization, model-based RL, multi-agent systems, and hierarchical learning. - Build scalable training, inference, monitoring, and retraining workflows alongside MLOps practices including experiment tracking, model versioning, and observability. - Partner with software engineers to integrate AI capabilities into production and customer-facing products. - Research and prototype emerging technologies including Generative AI, Agentic AI, LLMs, RAG, and multi-agent systems.
What you'll need
- Strong foundation in machine learning and deep learning with hands-on experience building and deploying production ML systems. - Strong Python development skills alongside experience with PyTorch and/or TensorFlow. - Demonstrated experience developing reinforcement learning solutions and formulating complex optimization problems as RL problems. - Strong understanding of RL concepts including environments, policies, rewards, value functions, and exploration strategies. - Experience with modern RL methods such as PPO, SAC, DQN, Actor-Critic, or similar approaches, including training and evaluating agents in simulation environments. - Experience with Git, testing, code reviews, CI/CD, and production software development.
Nice to have
- Experience building AI agents or autonomous decision-making systems. - Experience with discrete-event simulation or simulation-driven learning. - Experience combining RL with optimization techniques, operations research, scheduling, dispatching, or industrial optimization. - Experience with Azure, AWS, Google Cloud, Docker, Kubernetes, or MLflow. - Experience with Generative AI, LLMs, agent frameworks, or RAG. - Semiconductor manufacturing experience.
Skills: reinforcement learning, PyTorch, factory operations, scheduling, deep learning
This role has been open 0 days — well below the 52-day median for Software Engineering Semiconductor roles.
Software Engineering Semiconductor · Manufacturing Equipment
|
Open roles in category
192
|
Median days open
52 d
|
Median salary
$132k
|
See the full market breakdown ▾Category comparison, skills in demand, and who else is hiring
| Metric | Applied Materials | All employers we track in this specialty (192 roles · 35 employers) |
|---|---|---|
| Open roles in this specialty | 35 | 192 |
| Open roles in the wider Software, Firmware & Systems family | 165 | 6355 · 147 employers |
| Median days open | 33 d | 52 d (−19 d vs this employer) |
| Median salary (USD postings) | — | $132k |
Skills observed across this category: reinforcement learning, PyTorch, factory operations, scheduling, deep learning
Who's hiring in this category
- Applied Materials (this employer) · 35 open roles · median 34 d
- KLA Corporation · 32 open roles · median 73 d
- Lam Research · 20 open roles · median 39 d
- ASM International · 16 open roles · median 70 d
- Onto Innovation · 10 open roles · median 62 d
- Keysight Technologies · 9 open roles · median 86 d
How we counted: 192 open Software Engineering Semiconductor (Manufacturing Equipment) roles from 35 employers tracked in the SemiconductorJobs index, counted 29 Oct 2026. Specialty figures count only roles carrying this exact specialty label, so an employer's related work in neighbouring specialties is not included there — it is counted in the wider Software, Firmware & Systems family row. Figures refresh nightly.