Staff Machine Learning Engineer
Root Insurance9 days ago
Remote, United StatesStaff+
Base Salary
$189k - $265k/yr
Responsibilities
- Define the long-term technical roadmap and architecture for Root’s machine learning pricing platform.
- Build platform capabilities spanning feature engineering, feature pipelines and stores, model training, orchestration, serving, diagnostics, validation, monitoring, and production observability.
- Define versioned contracts connecting data, features, models, and production pricing to ensure reproducibility, lineage, consistency, and correctness.
- Automate end-to-end data science workflows, including the use of LLM technology for agentic workflow automation.
- Write and review code in critical platform components and drive technical design across systems and team dependencies.
- Mentor senior engineers on architecture, platform design, and engineering best practices.
- Establish standards for reliability, observability, reproducibility, and correctness across platform systems.
- Collaborate with Data Scientists, researchers, Actuarial, Product, Engineering, and leadership to translate research needs into scalable platform capabilities.
Requirements
- 10+ years of software engineering experience designing and delivering business-critical ML platforms, data platforms, or complex distributed systems.
- Demonstrated architectural ownership of production ML infrastructure, including feature systems, training and orchestration, model registries and versioning, model serving, or research-to-production infrastructure.
- Strong system design and distributed systems expertise, including reliable and scalable data processing systems and well-defined interfaces.
- Experience designing for reproducibility, lineage, versioning, training-serving consistency, and production correctness.
- Working knowledge of the machine learning lifecycle and the engineering requirements for training, evaluating, deploying, and operating models in production.
- Ability to establish technical direction in ambiguous environments and convert architectural goals into incremental plans.
- Track record of creating technical leverage across teams through platforms, abstractions, standards, or tooling.
- Ability to influence technical direction without direct authority and mentor senior engineers on architecture and system design.
- Strong collaboration experience with Data Scientists and researchers.
- Proficiency with Python and modern machine learning and data tooling.
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
- Preferred: understanding of statistical modeling, model assumptions, bias and variance, uncertainty, evaluation methods, and model failure modes.
- Preferred: experience with ML algorithms and frameworks and their impact on production system design.
- Preferred: experience improving model development velocity, experimentation, deployment reliability, or model quality through ML platform investments.
- Preferred: experience building ML infrastructure in insurance, fintech, financial services, healthcare, or another regulated or data-intensive domain.
- Preferred: experience building platforms for quantitative researchers or Data Scientists with demanding experimentation and reproducibility needs.
- Preferred: experience applying LLMs or agentic systems to developer tooling, research workflows, or data science automation.
Benefits
- Work-from-anywhere flexibility across the United States through Root’s “work where it works best” model.
- Eligible for a competitive bonus and equity offering.
- Reasonable accommodations are available throughout the hiring process.
- Virtual interviews require candidates to be on camera.
Tech Stack
Categories
About Root Insurance
Root Inc. is disrupting the archaic, trillion-dollar insurance industry. We’re driving the FinTech revolution by creating powerful insurance products and technology platforms that rewrite the rules for today’s world, promoting fairness, simplicity, and personalization. And we’re just getting started.