Senior Machine Learning Engineer
About The Position
Checkr is hiring an ML Engineer (P3) for its central Data & ML team within Engineering. The role builds and ships production AI systems that support Checkr’s core products, including document processing, charge classification, entity resolution, and in-product intelligence. The ML systems are production services used by Product Engineering teams to make background checks faster, more accurate, and less expensive to operate. This is an end-to-end production engineering role, not a research or notebook position. The engineer designs, codes, deploys, tests, and monitors ML services; uses LLM APIs and other approaches appropriately; and contributes to Checkr’s AI strategy, including its agentic fleet and semantic layer. The role works closely with Product Engineering, Product, and other cross-functional teams, translating business problems into ML solutions and defining API contracts. The position is intended for someone based in San Francisco. Checkr’s stated office policy expects employees to work from an office at least three days per week. Relocation support may be available for people relocating to a Checkr hub.
Requirements
- Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Mathematics, or a related technical field, or equivalent depth from experience.
- At least 6 years of professional software development experience, including at least 2 years building ML systems that run in production.
- Strong Python skills and ability to write clean, testable, well-structured code with sound object-oriented programming practices.
- Hands-on experience using LLM APIs in production systems, including prompt engineering, structured outputs, function calling, cost management, and evaluation.
- Experience building and maintaining APIs, working with CI/CD pipelines, and shipping code other engineers depend on.
- Comfort with and enthusiasm for AI-assisted workflows; ability to use AI tools while understanding and checking the code they produce.
- Strong bias for action, ownership, resilience through ambiguity, urgency, and commitment to delivering meaningful outcomes.
Nice To Haves
- Experience with MLOps platforms such as MLflow, SageMaker, or Vertex.
- Background in document processing, OCR, or information extraction.
- Experience with PySpark or large-scale data processing.
- Ruby experience; Checkr’s platform runs on Rails.
- Familiarity with compliance-sensitive domains such as fintech, legal tech, or HR tech.
- Working knowledge of dbt, Snowflake, or modern ELT and data transformation tools.
- Experience using LLMs, code-generation tools, or agentic systems in production or operational contexts.
Responsibilities
- Design, develop, and deploy production ML models and AI services, including model code, API layers, monitoring, and tests.
- Use LLM APIs in production and choose appropriately between LLM calls, fine-tuning, classical models, and rules, considering cost, latency, and quality.
- Write clean, well-structured software with appropriate abstractions, error handling, and tests; work through code review and CI/CD.
- Partner with Product and Engineering to translate business problems into ML solutions, define API contracts, and communicate approaches clearly to non-ML collaborators.
- Build evaluation frameworks, run experiments, and make data-driven decisions about model and system performance; ship and iterate quickly.
- Automate work processes, build agentic workflows, and contribute reusable skills and context to Checkr’s agentic platform.
- Contribute to Checkr’s broader AI strategy, including deployment of its agentic fleet and development of scalable context through its semantic layer.
Benefits
- Learning and development allowance.
- Competitive cash and equity compensation, with opportunity for advancement.
- 100% medical, dental, and vision coverage.
- Up to $25,000 reimbursement for fertility, adoption, and parental planning services.
- Flexible PTO policy.
- Monthly wellness stipend.
- Lunch five times a week at hub offices, commuter stipend, and snacks and beverages.
- Relocation stipend may be available for relocation to a Checkr hub location.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
