Job Closed
This listing is no longer active.
Our mission is to enable effortless credit based on true risk.
Staff Applied Machine Learning Engineer, LLM Applications
Location
California + 3 moreAll locations: California | New York | Ohio | Texas
Posted
170 days ago
Salary
$178.4K - $246.8K / year
Seniority
Lead
Job Description
Staff Applied Machine Learning Engineer, LLM Applications
Upstart
• Design and build user-facing ML features that harness LLMs and generative AI to unlock new product capabilities • Partner with product, design, and ML research to prototype and deliver high-impact, ML-powered experiences • Own the technical architecture and implementation strategy for applied ML systems - balancing latency, observability, and iteration speed • Build scalable services and APIs that bring model outputs to users in trustworthy and intuitive ways • Collaborate across platform, infra, and legal/compliance teams to ensure ML deployments meet standards for safety, fairness, and performance • Establish and evangelize best practices for prompt design, model evaluation, and experimentation across the org
Job Requirements
- 6+ years of software engineering experience, with 2+ years working directly on ML-driven products or intelligent systems
- Proven ability to lead complex initiatives across engineering, product, and research stakeholders
- Strong backend development skills (e.g., Python with FastAPI or Flask), plus experience with cloud-native tooling (e.g., Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform)
- Experience integrating LLMs or ML models into production systems, including APIs and user-facing applications
- Excellent communication skills and a collaborative, product-minded approach
- Ability to think rigorously about system design, latency tradeoffs, and user impact when working with ML features.
- Experience shipping GenAI or LLM-powered features using frameworks like LangChain, LlamaIndex, or OpenAI APIs (preferred)
- Familiarity with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), vector search (e.g., FAISS, Pinecone), and real-time inference patterns (preferred)
- Proficiency in full-stack development, including front-end work with React or similar frameworks (preferred)
- Strong intuition for prompt engineering, model testing, and evaluation methodologies (preferred)
- Experience navigating complex requirements around explainability, user trust, or compliance in ML applications (preferred)
- Track record of influencing architecture or product direction at a team or org level (preferred)
Benefits
- Competitive Compensation (base + bonus & equity)
- Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage with Health Savings Account contributions from Upstart
- 401(k) with 100% company match up to $4,500 and immediate vesting and after-tax savings
- Employee Stock Purchase Plan (ESPP)
- Life and disability insurance
- Generous holiday, vacation, sick and safety leave
- Supportive parental, family care, and military leave programs
- Annual wellness, technology & ergonomic reimbursement programs
- Social activities including team events and onsites, all-company updates, employee resource groups (ERGs), and other interest groups such as book clubs, fitness, investing, and volunteering
- Catered lunches + snacks & drinks when working in offices
Related Guides
Related Job Pages
More Machine Learning Engineer Jobs
• On a typical day for the data science team, we sync in the morning during stand-ups to discuss the on-going work and identify blockers or areas of collaboration. • During the day, we will be brainstorming and prototyping models to solve specific business problems. • Or, we will be writing robust, well-tested code for new model deployments or supporting the design of A/B tests. • Or we can be collaborating with other teams to gain a better understanding of business domain, data or requirements
Machine Learning Engineer – Healthcare Focused
West Virginia UniversityWVU Medicine, the West Virginia University Health System, provides advanced healthcare services to the people of West Virginia and surrounding regions. Encompas
• Data mining, data cleaning, data engineering. • Select features, build, and optimize classifiers for the use of machine learning techniques. • Develop new ML algorithms to find predictive patterns. • Establish meaningful criteria for evaluating algorithm performance and suitability. • Automate model training and testing and deployment via machine learning continuous delivery pipelines. • Implement working, scalable, production-ready Machine Learning and AI Process Automation models and code. • Optimize processes for maximum speed, performance and accuracy. • Keep up to date with Machine Learning best practices and evolving open source frameworks. • Work in an agile team in a scrum process, collaborating closely with software engineers, data scientists, data engineers, subject domain experts and QA analysts.
This description is a summary of our understanding of the job description. Click on 'Apply' button to find out more. Role Description FTI is seeking a Distinguished AI/ML Engineer to serve as a technical leader, architect, and integrator — designing, building, deploying, and sustaining AI systems that transform complex mission data into trusted, explainable insights. This is a hands-on builder role, not an analytics management position. The ideal candidate is equally comfortable writing model code, standing up ML pipelines, and integrating AI inference services into operational systems within secure environments. The right candidate blends deep AI/ML engineering expertise with system-level architecture leadership and an ability to unify data engineering, simulation modeling, and responsible AI principles into scalable, mission-ready capabilities. Responsibilities - Architect and integrate hybrid AI systems that combine traditional machine learning, deep learning, large language models (LLMs), and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines. - Design and deploy scalable AI architectures including APIs, microservices, and model-serving frameworks that integrate seamlessly with analytic, simulation, or operational systems. - Lead the full AI/ML lifecycle — from data ingestion and feature engineering through training, deployment, and sustainment within secure DoD environments (IL5/IL6, ATO, GovCloud). - Engineer event-driven data pipelines and feature stores for both structured and unstructured data, including text, imagery, and simulation outputs. - Ensure Responsible AI practices by embedding traceability, explainability, and confidence scoring into deployed systems. - Implement and maintain MLOps pipelines (MLflow, Kubeflow, Airflow, Docker/Kubernetes) to support continuous integration, retraining, and drift detection. - Transition R&D prototypes into production, optimizing for mission constraints such as limited compute, edge environments, or disconnected operations. - Provide technical leadership and mentorship, setting standards for model quality, architectural design, and ethical AI deployment across programs. - Collaborate across engineering, data, and modeling teams to unify FTI’s AI portfolio, ensuring interoperability and reuse across mission systems. - Support proposal and solution development, providing technical inputs for AI/ML architectures, data strategies, and Responsible AI assurance frameworks. Qualifications - Preferring candidates close to Dayton OH, Chesapeake VA, Huntsville AL, or Colorado Springs CO. Or willing to travel to these locations and customer sites, as needed. - Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field (Master’s or Ph.D. preferred). - 10+ years of overall experience in AI/ML development, with 5+ years designing and deploying scalable AI/ML architectures, including at least two full lifecycle implementations (from prototype to operational system). - Proficiency in Python, PyTorch, TensorFlow, and modern ML frameworks. - Experience designing or deploying systems using vector databases (Milvus, Pinecone, Weaviate), knowledge graphs, and semantic search frameworks. - Proven ability to design event-driven data pipelines using Databricks, Spark, Flink, or Kafka. - Demonstrated experience deploying AI/ML systems in secure, classified, or edge environments. - Familiarity with Responsible AI and assurance principles, including bias detection, explainability, human-machine teaming, and hallucination prevention. - Experience integrating AI models into simulation, modeling, or operational planning systems is highly desirable. - Experience transitioning R&D systems into accredited production environments. - Active Secret clearance required; TS/SCI strongly preferred. - Strong communication and mentoring skills, with the ability to lead technically while remaining deeply hands-on.
Senior Software Engineer, Machine Learning – Simulations Platform
UpstartOur mission is to enable effortless credit based on true risk.
• Build, maintain, and optimize Upstart’s next-generation machine learning and simulation platform, enabling increased scale, performance, and confidence in decisioning • Develop high-quality software applications that enable machine learning models to be applied to the ever-evolving needs of the business • Enable the modernization of our serving infrastructure, reducing inference latency to just a few seconds for our most complex models • Design and contribute to our simulation systems to more accurately reflect production environments, reducing simulation cost and enabling broader usage across teams • Communicate closely with cross-functional partners from ML, Engineering, Product, and Data Engineering teams, keeping all stakeholders informed • Mentor engineers across the team, sharing expertise on distributed systems, MLOps, and scalable architecture

