Staff Machine Learning Engineer - Leasing
About the role
We're looking for a Staff Machine Learning Engineer to own the ML strategy and execution for the Realm-X Leasing Performer, an autonomous AI agent handling the leasing lifecycle for property managers and leasing teams.
Responsibilities
Own the ML strategy for leasing: Define and drive the machine learning roadmap, identify where ML creates the most leverage, make the right model and architecture bets, and align the team around a coherent technical vision reflecting real customer outcomes.
Drive the development and architecture for autonomous AI agents: Be the ML lead for AppFolio's autonomous leasing agent, shaping its communication with tenants and improving its leasing operations.
Translate research into product: Partner with Voice & Agents and Research ML to evaluate new capabilities, fine-tune approaches, and decide what's ready to ship.
Set the ML bar for Leasing Engineering: Establish patterns, standards, and practices for integrating ML, from prompt engineering to model selection.
Operate with production discipline: Ensure ML systems powering the Leasing Performer meet reliability standards, including SLOs, observability, cost discipline, and clear on-call posture.
Qualifications
Systems thinker: Think in terms of platforms and long-term leverage, not just features; understand how ML infrastructure decisions compound over time.
Production builder: Build and scale ML infrastructure in production with meaningful business impact; treat it like any other production system.
Domain curiosity: Take time to understand leasing workflows and use that understanding to make better technical bets.
Ambiguity: Operate effectively in high ambiguity, turning unclear infra problems into clear direction.
Owner-operator: Take ownership with a founder mindset, act with urgency, and focus on outcomes.
Collaboration: Be humble, collaborative, and low-ego; elevate those around you and work fluidly across ML, product, and engineering.
Reliability mindset: Treat ML infra like any other production system: SLOs, on-call, observability, postmortems.
Sustainability: Value work-life balance as a foundation for sustained high performance.
ML Development at scale: Built and supported production ML systems at scale.
Architectural Leadership: Led architectural discussions, defined system design, and guided technical decision-making.
Inference & Training: Trained or fine-tuned language models end-to-end; comfortable with deep learning, evaluation, and inference.
RAG & agents: Hands-on experience with LangChain / LangGraph and modern RAG patterns over structured and unstructured data.
AI safety & authorization: Hands-on experience operating AI guardrails, scoped tool permissions, and authorization layers for production AI systems—especially in agentic contexts.
Nice to Have
Experience building ML systems for conversational AI, leasing, or CRM-adjacent workflows.
GPU performance tuning (vLLM, TensorRT, Triton, or similar).
Familiarity with real estate, property management, or leasing workflows.
Contributions to open-source ML infrastructure or LLM tooling.
About AppFolio
We're 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.
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 drives the growth of our business, and ourselves. We're 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. We excel at hybrid work by fostering an environment that feels flexible, personal, and connected, no matter where we are. We create space to fuel innovation and collaboration, and we come together to celebrate, connect, and succeed.
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. 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.