Sr. ML Engineer

Who We Are

Are you an experienced Machine Learning Engineer who is passionate about your work, enjoys solving fun problems and has demonstrated success in cross collaborative work including mentoring and educating those you work with so that the team as a whole grows and is successful together? Do you enjoy the early work of taking on new ways of building systems and machines to learn, expand and make a positive impact? Then we have a role for you! 

At Mainstay, we help colleges, universities, and other organizations communicate with their students and members.  Our motivation is to help those students and members achieve success.  One of the ways we do this is to provide a “chatbot” that can automatically respond to and answer many common questions. We believe one spark of conversation can have a great impact on a learners journey, and we want you to help us with that impact. 

To accomplish this, we’ve custom built a “retrieval-based” chatbot system, using common machine learning libraries and models.  Our system is still young and needs development, refinement, and expansion.  There’s lots of fun work to do, including trying out new methods of training and the latest models.

What You’ll Do

Your core role will be built around designing, building, and/or delivering ML models and components that enhance the core product and solve business problems, while working in collaboration with the Product, Engineering and Data Science teams. This will include: 

• Retrain, maintain, and monitor existing models in production
• Inform the ML infrastructure decisions using your understanding of ML modeling techniques and issues, including choice of model, data, and feature selection, model training, hyperparameter tuning, dimensionality, bias/variance, and validation
• Leverage continuous integration and continuous deployment best practices, including test automation and monitoring, to ensure successful deployment of ML models and application code
• Ensure all code is well-managed to reduce vulnerabilities, models are well-governed from a risk perspective, and the ML follows best practices in Responsible and Explainable AI
• Identify and implement strategies to close the loop with human interaction for data products
• Ensure high availability and performance of our machine learning systems
• Continuously learn and apply the latest innovations and best practices in machine learning engineering

In this role and within our Engineering team environment we will also look to you to be the voice of ML and feel confident and comfortable building strong cross functional relationships with data scientists, product managers and other software engineers with ML as your area of expertise and functional ownership. 

What You’ve Done

• 7+ years of work experience researching, building, deploying, instrumenting, and monitoring ML algorithms & ML pipelines on cloud environments (AWS, Azure, GCloud, etc)
• We expect the most successful candidates for this role will also have prior years of work experience in general Software Engineering roles/environments
• Expert level skills in common ML and data analysis frameworks such as pandas, sklearn, pytorch, tensorflow
• We aim to avoid putting Higher Ed degrees as required - yet with the specific nature of this role and education or commiserate years of experience required we imagine that the most successful candidates will have a Masters or PhD in Computer Science, Statistics, or Data Science or exceptional knowledge of ML/AI techniques.
• Strong skills and experience with natural language processing (NLP), neural networks, vector embeddings, and entity extraction
• Strong Python skills

Mainstay is committed to creating a company where all employees regardless of background can show up and feel they belong. This is an ongoing journey, and we welcome questions one here we’re at during your interview process. We are proud to be an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, disability, age, veteran status, or fitness level.

The minimum pay for this role is $180,000. Actual compensation packages are based on a wide array of factors unique to each candidate including but not limited to demonstrated skill set, years & depth of experience, and some role dependent factors that can include certifications and software expertise. We also hope you’ll consider and be open to what else we provide outside of our base compensation. This includes our benefits, perks, equity, and other aspects of our overall employer brand including our culture which is built on our mission, vision and values.  We welcome direct conversations with each candidate about compensation in all our initial calls.