Senior Software Engineer, Forecasting & Real-Time Optimization
About The Position
The Senior Software Engineer will join Lyft’s Forecasting and Real-Time Optimization Platform (FORTOP) team in the Rideshare Experience & Marketplace organization. FORTOP provides real-time marketplace supply and demand signals and forecasts that support automated business decisions and products including Dynamic Pricing, Real-Time Supply Management, Fulfillment, and Driver Incentives. The role leads the design and operation of production systems that turn streaming marketplace data into accurate and reliable forecasts. This includes real-time feature pipelines, model training and inference infrastructure, backtesting and evaluation tooling, and signal-serving systems queried by downstream products. The engineer partners with scientists to take models from prototype to production, and works with downstream teams to define interfaces and reliability guarantees. The forecasting systems cover rider demand and driver supply as they change with traffic, holidays, and major events, and must remain correct and fast during peak periods.
Requirements
- At least 5 years of software engineering industry experience, including building and operating backend or data systems in production.
- BS/MS or equivalent in Computer Engineering, Computer Science, or a related field, or relevant work experience.
- Experience designing and leading delivery of large-scale distributed systems and owning their reliability through monitoring, on-call, and incident response.
- Solid distributed systems fundamentals, including fault tolerance, delivery semantics, and consistency tradeoffs.
- Track record of leading ambiguous, multi-engineer projects and mentoring other engineers.
- Clear written communication, including the ability to write design documents that align stakeholders.
Nice To Haves
- Experience building production ML models and infrastructure, such as model selection, feature engineering and pipelines, training and inference pipelines, model serving, or ML platforms.
- Hands-on experience with stream or large-scale batch processing (such as Flink, Beam, or Spark) and distributed messaging (such as Kafka or Kinesis).
- Experience with time-series forecasting systems or familiarity with backtesting and forecast evaluation, including error metrics, bias, and calibration.
- Experience with online experimentation or real-time decision systems such as pricing, dispatch, or marketplace balancing.
- Comfort using AI-assisted development tools to move faster without compromising quality.
Responsibilities
- Lead multi-engineer projects from proposal and technical design through launch; establish milestones, align dependencies with partner teams, and own estimates.
- Design and evolve streaming feature pipelines, training and inference workflows, and signal serving, leading design reviews with attention to latency, correctness, scalability, and cost.
- Reduce system complexity by consolidating or sunsetting components.
- Partner with scientists to design and productionize ML models.
- Build rollout tooling, including shadow, canary, and rollback capabilities, as well as backtesting and experimentation infrastructure.
- Define and maintain interfaces, data contracts, and SLAs between forecasting signals and downstream consumers such as Dynamic Pricing and Driver Incentives.
- Monitor system health, including latency, freshness, and error rates, and signal quality, including accuracy, bias, and drift; prepare systems for peak events.
- Participate in on-call, lead post-incident investigations, and drive resulting action items to completion.
- Write well-tested, maintainable code and conduct code reviews that improve others’ work; coach teammates on testing and engineering practices.
- Collaborate with Product, Science, and partner engineering teams to frame problems, shape the roadmap, and make tradeoffs between accuracy, latency, and complexity.
- Mentor engineers, participate in hiring and onboarding, and share knowledge through design documents, runbooks, and technical talks.
Benefits
- Medical, dental, and vision insurance options, with additional programs available when enrolled.
- Mental health benefits.
- Family-building benefits.
- Child care and pet benefits.
- 401(k) plan with company match.
- 12 observed holidays; salaried team members receive discretionary paid time off, while hourly team members receive 15 days of paid time off.
- 18 weeks of paid parental leave for biological, adoptive, and foster parents.
- Subsidized commuter benefits.
- Monthly Lyft credits and complimentary Lyft Pink membership.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
