Senior Machine Learning Engineer
About The Position
Checkr is hiring a Machine Learning Engineer (P3) for its central ML team within the Data & ML organization in Engineering. The role builds and ships production ML/AI systems that support core products, including document processing, charge classification, entity resolution, and in-product intelligence. This is an end-to-end production engineering role rather than a research or notebook-focused position: the engineer designs, codes, deploys, monitors, and tests ML services that Product Engineering teams rely on. The engineer will use LLM APIs and other modeling approaches as appropriate, balancing cost, latency, and quality, and will develop evaluation frameworks to guide experiments and iterations. The role partners closely with Product Engineering, Product, and cross-functional teams, contributes to Checkr’s broader AI strategy, and helps develop agentic workflows and reusable context for Checkr’s agentic platform. The position is intended for someone based in San Francisco and the company expects employees at its hubs to work from the office at least three days per week.
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 fluency and ability to write clean, testable, well-structured code with solid object-oriented programming instincts.
- 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 that other engineers depend on.
- Comfort with and enthusiasm for AI-assisted workflows; ability to use AI tools while understanding and reviewing their output and identifying AI slop.
- Strong bias for action, ownership, resilience through ambiguity, urgency, and ability to deliver meaningful outcomes.
Nice To Haves
- Experience with MLOps platforms such as MLflow, SageMaker, Vertex, or similar.
- 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/data transformation tools.
- Experience using LLMs, code-generation tools, or agentic systems in production or operational contexts.
Responsibilities
- Design, develop, and deploy ML models and AI systems used by Product Engineering teams.
- Build and own production ML services end to end, including model code, API layers, monitoring, and tests.
- Use LLM APIs as production building blocks, selecting among LLMs, fine-tuning, classical models, and rules based on the problem and balancing cost, latency, and quality.
- Write clean, well-structured production software with appropriate abstractions, error handling, and tests, and work within CI/CD processes.
- Partner with product and engineering teams to translate business problems into ML solutions, define API contracts, and clearly communicate technical approaches to non-ML partners.
- Build evaluation frameworks, run experiments, and use data to assess and improve model and system performance.
- Automate pipelines, 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.
- In-office lunch five times a week, commuter stipend, snacks, and beverages.
- Relocation stipend may be available for people willing to relocate to a Checkr hub location.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
