Sephora Lead Machine Learning Engineer
- Location
- RemoteCaliforniaUSA
- Employment
- Full-Time
- Seniority
- Lead
- Compensation
- $172,350–212,800/year
- Department
- IT & Technology Systems
- Posted
- May 7, 2026
About Sephora
Sephora is a global beauty retailer known for a curated assortment of cosmetics, skincare and fragrance brands and for pioneering an experiential retail model. As part of the LVMH group, Sephora combines retail scale with a strong emphasis on innovation, digital product development, and brand collaboration, offering technologists opportunities to build consumer-facing, data-driven experiences.
Sephora — Lead Machine Learning Engineer (Remote, USA). Lead architecture and production deployment of LLMs, RAG and agentic AI systems.
Role & Responsibilities
- Architect and engineer production-grade AI/ML systems and LLM infrastructure with a security-first, reliability-first mindset.
- Own end-to-end ML solutions including batch and real-time model serving, RAG systems, agentic pipelines, and LLMOps infrastructure.
- Design and optimize scalable, automated ML pipelines for data processing, feature engineering, model development, validation and deployment to ensure reproducibility and operational excellence.
- Build and maintain tooling for monitoring, observability, logging, automated testing, performance testing, and A/B experimentation to guarantee production reliability and iterative improvement.
- Deliver high-quality, well-tested code in a continuous-release environment; enforce CI/CD, code review standards and test coverage across ML services and agentic workflows.
- Collaborate cross-functionally with Product, Engineering, Data Science and business stakeholders to translate requirements into technically sound, scalable solutions.
- Drive delivery planning, prioritize epics, manage dependencies and apply economic thinking to maximize engineering ROI.
- Mentor and develop ML Engineers and Data Scientists; promote best practices in ML engineering, code quality and operational excellence.
Qualifications
- Minimum 5+ years of hands-on ML engineering experience taking models from experimentation to production at scale.
- Minimum 8+ years of professional software engineering experience with strong proficiency in Python, distributed systems and API design.
- At least 3+ years building and deploying LLM-powered applications, including RAG pipelines, prompt engineering and fine-tuning.
- Practical experience designing and delivering agentic/multi-agent systems using frameworks such as LangChain or LangGraph (or comparable toolsets).
- Demonstrable expertise with ML infrastructure and tooling including Kubernetes, Docker, Databricks, MLflow, and vector databases and experience on at least one cloud platform (AWS, GCP, or Azure).
- Proven ability to influence cross-functional stakeholders and communicate complex technical trade-offs clearly.
Skills
Experience
Requires 8+ years of software engineering experience with at least 5+ years focused on ML engineering and 3+ years deploying LLM/generative AI applications to production, including experience operating at enterprise scale.
Education
Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Data Science or a related technical discipline; Master’s degree preferred.
Workplace
This position is based in Remote, California, USA.
Compensation
The base compensation for this position ranges from USD 172,350 to USD 212,800 per annum.
Benefits
Medical, dental and vision coverage; employer-paid disability and life insurance; 401(k) with 4% match; FSA and HSA; Student Debt Retirement plan (student loan payments qualify to earn 401(k) match); PTO and protected leave; tuition reimbursement; 30% employee discount on merchandise/services; opportunities for free product/gratis and LVMH flash-sale discounts; access to Modern Health and Financial Finesse (mental health and financial coaching); volunteer and donation matching.
Culture
Sephora emphasizes inclusivity, creativity and customer-centric innovation; the organization blends retail and digital expertise to build differentiated beauty experiences. The working culture supports cross-disciplinary collaboration, continuous learning and a high degree of ownership for engineers building consumer-facing AI products.
About Cerulean
Cerulean is the definitive career portal for the global luxury industry. We match exceptional professionals with exclusive opportunities at the world's most prestigious brands. From haute couture and fine watchmaking to prestige beauty, hospitality, and boutique retail, Cerulean centralises luxury employment to help you find the career for which you were destined.
Frequently Asked Questions
The luxury industry is characterised by a diverse and nuanced nomenclature. Esteemed houses frequently employ proprietary terminology, and even within a single organisation like Sephora, titles may vary across global markets to reflect local conventions. To ensure absolute clarity, Cerulean assigns a standardised, industry-coherent canonical title to every listing. However, it is worth noting that this role is functionally synonymous with «Lead ML Engineer», «ML Engineering Lead», «Senior Machine Learning Engineer», «Lead AI Engineer», and other variations. Our sophisticated search architecture anticipates these variations, ensuring that inquiries using related terms will seamlessly yield the exact roles you desire.