Netskope
Senior Staff / Principal Machine Learning Scientist, AI Inference & Optimization
Santa Clara, California, United States · Principal
Stay score
odds of building a lasting career here
Sponsors, but it's cap-subject — you still face the weighted lottery (~61% per draw at Level IV). Good if you win; have a cap-exempt backup on your list.
Lottery odds assume a STEM candidate.
Personalize to your clock →H-1B wage level
the lottery is wage-weighted — each level is one more entry
The bottom of this range ($124,500) is below the Level I prevailing wage of $125,486. An H-1B cannot be filed below the prevailing wage, so an offer at the floor of this band could not be sponsored as posted.
Based on the DOL prevailing wage for this occupation and worksite, a base salary of $168,917 would place this position at wage Level II. That figure is within the posted range, and I'd like to target it. This role classifies under "Data Scientists" for prevailing-wage purposes.
DOL prevailing wage, 2026-27 wage year · Data Scientists (15-2051) · San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA. Wage level is derived by USCIS from the offered wage, occupation and worksite; the occupation shown is inferred from the job title.
Employer immigration record
from this employer's Department of Labor filings
Files H-1B transfers
Sourced from Department of Labor LCA, PERM and prevailing-wage disclosure data. Employer matching is by name, so figures may be split across an employer's legal entities. Absence of a filing means none appears in our copy of the data, not that none exists.
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About the role
- The hard, interesting inference problems live here: quantization, KV-cache and memory management, sparsity, fine-tuning, and hardware acceleration under real-world resource constraints.
- 10+ years of overall industry experience, with 4+ years hands-on in ML/AI (model development, fine-tuning, and inference optimization).
Responsibilities
- High-impact ownership. You own the model layer of a net-new product that changes the performance and economics of agentic AI.
- Real scale to build against. Netskope's customer footprint gives you production signals most teams never see, so you deploy, validate, and iterate fast.
- 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.
- You own the model layer of a net-new product that changes the performance and economics of agentic AI.
- Real scale to build against.
- Netskope's 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.
Requirements
- Required skills and experience
Nice to have
- Hands-on with fine-tuning (e.g. LoRA/QLoRA), quantization (GGUF/AWQ/GPTQ), and inference runtimes (vLLM/SGLang, TensorRT-LLM, ONNX Runtime, llama.cpp, or MLX/CoreML).
- On-device or edge inference experience is a strong plus.
- comfort reaching into C++ for low-level interop is a plus.
- PhD in a related field strongly preferred.
Skills
- Join the Future of Security at Netskope
- Netskope (NASDAQ:
- NTSK) is a leader in modern security and networking for the cloud and AI era.
- At Netskope, our technology is driven by our greatest strength:
- Visit Careers at Netskope to learn more.
- Follow us on LinkedIn and Instagram.
- Positions are available at Senior Staff and above.
- Candidates are assessed individually and leveled according to their specific skills and background.
Compensation
- At Netskope, salary is one component of our competitive total rewards package.
- The salary range for this position is as listed below.
- The successful candidate's starting pay will also be determined based on job-related skills, experience, qualifications, location, and market conditions.
- For all sales roles, the posted salary range is the On Target Earnings (OTE) range for the role, which is the sum of base salary and target commission amount at 100% goal achievement.
- In addition to salary, candidates may be eligible for other forms of compensation such as participation in a bonus plan (for non-sales roles) and a stock award program.
- $124,500 - $272,000 USD
Company info
- 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.
This listing is sourced directly from Netskope's careers page and normalized into a canonical job model.