Staff Machine Learning Engineer

Qualifications

• Systems thinker: You think in terms of platforms and long-term leverage, not just features.
• Production builder: You've built and scaled ML infrastructure in production with meaningful business impact.
• Ambiguity: You operate effectively in high ambiguity, turning unclear infra problems into clear direction.
• Owner-operator: You take ownership with a founder/owner-operator mindset, act with urgency, and focus on outcomes.
• Pace: You have a strong desire to move fast and deliver impact, while maintaining sound engineering judgment.
• Collaboration: You are humble, collaborative, and low-ego, and you elevate those around you.
• Sustainability: You value work-life balance as a foundation for sustained high performance.
• Reliability mindset: You treat ML infra like any other production system — SLOs, on-call, observability, postmortems.

Must Have

• ML infra at scale: Has built and operated production ML infrastructure on AWS — ECS, SageMaker, GPUs, autoscaling, and cost controls.
• Inference platforms: Production experience with model serving for both LLMs and custom models; understands quantization, batching, and routing.
• Provider breadth: Direct experience integrating with Google (Vertex / Gemini), OpenAI, and Anthropic APIs in production.
• Training capability: Has trained or fine-tuned language models end-to-end; comfortable with deep learning, evaluation, and inference.
• Cloud-native engineering: Strong Python, Docker, dependency management, and CI/CD for AI workloads.
• RAG & agents: Working knowledge of LangChain / LangGraph and modern RAG patterns over structured and unstructured data.
• Cost optimization: Demonstrated experience reducing unit cost of AI workloads without regressing quality or latency.
• AI safety & authorization: Hands-on experience operating AI guardrails, scoped tool permissions, and authorization layers for production AI systems.

Nice to Have

• Experience training Small Language Models for production use.
• GPU performance tuning (vLLM, TensorRT, Triton, or similar).
• Prior Staff-level role at a company with a significant AI infra footprint.
• Experience with ontology-driven systems or knowledge graphs supporting AI applications.
• Contributions to open-source ML infrastructure or LLM tooling.

Impact

We are creating a world where living in, investing in, managing, and supporting communities feels magical and effortless, freeing people to thrive. We do this by innovating with purpose while cultivating a culture of impact. We learn as much from each other as we do our customers and our communities.

About AppFolio

AppFolio is the technology leader powering the future of the real estate industry. Our innovative platform and trusted partnership enable our customers to connect communities, increase operational efficiency, and grow their business. For more information about AppFolio, visit appfolio.com.

Why AppFolio

We enable a culture of high performance, where delivering results is recognized by opportunities for growth and compelling total rewards. Our challenging and meaningful work drive the growth of our business, and ourselves. We partner with you to realize your potential by investing in you from the start. We're cultivating a team of big thinkers through coaching and mentorship with our best-in-class leaders, and giving you the time and tools to develop your skills.

Compensation & Benefits

The compensation that we reasonably expect to pay for this role is: $200,000 - 250,000 base pay. The actual compensation for this role will be determined by a variety of factors, including but not limited to the candidate’s skills, education, experience, and internal equity. Please note that compensation is just one aspect of a comprehensive Total Rewards package. The compensation range listed here does not include additional benefits or any discretionary bonuses you may be eligible for based on your role and/or employment type.

Regular full-time employees are eligible for benefits - see here.

Statement of Equal Opportunity

At AppFolio, we value diversity in backgrounds and perspectives and depend on it to drive our innovative culture. That’s why we’re a proud Equal Opportunity Employer, and we believe that our products, our teams, and our business are stronger because of it. This means that no matter what race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, marital status, ancestry, physical or mental disability, or veteran status, you’re always welcome at AppFolio.