Staff Machine Learning Engineer

Kikoff • San Francisco, CA

1d

About The Position

Kikoff is seeking a Staff Machine Learning Engineer to set the technical direction for machine learning at Kikoff. ML is central to Kikoff's business, powering underwriting, risk, personalization, and growth models. As a Staff engineer, you will own the ML platform and modeling roadmap end to end, deciding how models are built, evaluated, shipped, and governed. You will lead high-impact projects and elevate the ML engineering standards across the company. This is a hands-on role with company-level impact, not a management track.

Requirements

• 8+ years of software or machine learning engineering experience
• 5+ years building, deploying, and operating ML systems in production
• Prior experience as a technical lead or the most senior ML engineer on a team
• Demonstrated ownership of ML systems with direct, measurable business impact at scale
• Expert-level Python
• Strong general software engineering fundamentals and system design skills
• Deep experience with the full ML lifecycle in production: feature engineering, training, evaluation, serving (batch and real-time), monitoring, and retraining
• Hands-on experience designing ML platform components such as feature stores, model registries, and evaluation frameworks, and making pragmatic build-vs-buy decisions
• Strong command of gradient-boosted trees and classical ML for tabular data
• Working knowledge of deep learning frameworks (e.g., PyTorch) where applicable
• Production experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS or GCP), containerization (Docker, Kubernetes), and modern MLOps and CI/CD tooling
• Understanding of model governance in a regulated financial environment, including fair lending considerations, explainability, and model validation practices
• Exceptional ability to frame ambiguous problems, design sound experiments, and reason carefully about causality, selection bias, and the gap between offline metrics and real-world outcomes
• A history of influencing technical direction beyond your immediate team without formal authority
• Able to explain complex modeling decisions and their business implications crisply to executives, and to mentor engineers at all levels
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, Statistics, or a related field

Nice To Haves

• Experience in consumer lending, credit underwriting, fraud, or payments strongly preferred
• Experience working alongside Ruby/Rails backends is a plus
• Experience working with Risk or Compliance partners on model approval processes is a plus
• Advanced degree preferred

Responsibilities

• Define the multi-quarter vision for ML at Kikoff, spanning underwriting, fraud and risk, and personalization.
• Identify where ML creates outsized business value, size the opportunity, and drive alignment with Product, Risk, Finance, and Engineering leadership.
• Architect and evolve the ML platform, including feature stores, training and evaluation pipelines, model registry, real-time and batch serving, and monitoring.
• Make build-vs-buy decisions and set standards for ML systems in production.
• Lead the most consequential modeling work, including cash advance and credit underwriting models, owning the full lifecycle from problem framing to iteration.
• Partner with Risk, Compliance, and Legal to establish model governance, including documentation, fair-lending analysis, explainability, validation, drift monitoring, and audit readiness.
• Set standards for ML change testing and measurement, including experiment design, guardrail metrics, and the link between offline evaluation and business outcomes.
• Act as the technical counterpart to product and business leaders on ML initiatives, translating business goals into technical strategies and communicating tradeoffs to stakeholders.
• Raise the engineering bar through design reviews, code reviews, and hands-on mentorship, shaping hiring and team structure as the ML function scales.

Benefits

• record revenue growth in 2025
• unicorn valuation
• profitable, pre-IPO fintech company
• mission to empower everyone to achieve financial security
• suite of products that help millions of people build credit, access liquidity, and save money
• scaling fast
• build something meaningful and help millions of people move forward financially
• working with serial entrepreneurs who have built strong consumer brands and innovative products
• extreme ownership
• clear communication
• strong sense of craftsmanship
• desire to create lasting work and work relationships
• build an exciting business AND have real-life real-customer impact

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior