Kikoff

Staff Machine Learning Engineer

Kikoff
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13 hours ago

Base Salary

$307k - $352k/yr

Responsibilities

  • Define the multi-quarter ML technical vision and roadmap across underwriting, fraud, risk, and personalization.
  • Own the ML platform, including feature stores, training and evaluation pipelines, model registries, batch and real-time serving, monitoring, and build-versus-buy decisions.
  • Lead consequential modeling work such as cash advance and credit underwriting models from problem framing and data strategy through validation, launch, champion/challenger testing, and iteration.
  • Establish model governance practices covering documentation, fair-lending and disparate-impact analysis, explainability, validation, drift monitoring, performance monitoring, and audit readiness.
  • Set standards for experiment design, guardrail metrics, offline evaluation, and measurement of business outcomes.
  • Act as the technical counterpart to product and business leaders and communicate ML tradeoffs, risks, and results to executives and nontechnical stakeholders.
  • Raise the engineering bar through design reviews, code reviews, hands-on mentorship, hiring input, and team-structure guidance.

Requirements

  • 8+ years of software or machine learning engineering experience, including 5+ years building, deploying, and operating ML systems in production.
  • Prior experience as a technical lead or the most senior ML engineer on a team, with ownership of ML systems producing measurable business impact at scale.
  • Expert-level Python and strong software engineering fundamentals and system design skills.
  • Deep production experience across feature engineering, training, evaluation, batch and real-time serving, monitoring, and retraining.
  • Hands-on experience designing feature stores, model registries, evaluation frameworks, and other ML platform components.
  • Strong command of gradient-boosted trees and classical ML for tabular data, plus working knowledge of deep learning frameworks such as PyTorch.
  • Production experience with AWS or GCP, Docker, Kubernetes, and modern MLOps and CI/CD tooling.
  • Understanding of model governance in regulated financial environments, including fair lending, explainability, and model validation; experience with Risk or Compliance partners is a plus.
  • Ability to design sound experiments and reason about causality, selection bias, and the gap between offline metrics and real-world outcomes.
  • Ability to influence technical direction without formal authority, communicate complex modeling decisions to executives, and mentor engineers at all levels.
  • Experience in consumer lending, credit underwriting, fraud, or payments is strongly preferred.
  • Experience working alongside Ruby/Rails backends is a plus.
  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, Statistics, or a related field; an advanced degree is preferred.

Benefits

  • Base salary range of $307,000—$352,000 USD.
  • Opportunity to work at a profitable, pre-IPO consumer fintech company with products serving millions of customers.
  • Hands-on company-level impact with no formal management-track requirement.
Kikoff

About Kikoff

201-500 employees
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