Staff Software Engineer, Machine Learning

About Attentive

Attentive is an AI marketing platform for personalized customer experiences across SMS, RCS, email, and push notifications, serving more than 8,000 customers across 70+ industries.

About the Role

The Machine Learning Engineering team powers personalized experiences for hundreds of millions of customers across thousands of brands. This role builds, scales, and operates production-grade ML systems for real-time personalization across the Attentive platform.

The posting title is Staff Software Engineer, Machine Learning; the role description refers to a Senior Machine Learning Engineer. This is a full-time, hybrid position in San Francisco, California.

Responsibilities

• Own high-quality ML systems and partner closely with Product and Engineering.
• Proactively prevent regressions through a variety of testing techniques.
• Collaborate, provide technical leadership, and communicate effectively.
• Improve project quality through direct contributions and advocacy for longer-term, larger-scale changes.
• Help raise the technical bar in a fast-paced, high-impact, late-stage startup environment.

Qualifications

• At least 6 years of professional experience building systems, including sustained work on a single system long enough to see the consequences of technical decisions; 10+ years is ideal.
• Experience with TensorFlow/PyTorch, XGBoost, pandas, matplotlib, SQL, Spark, or similar tools.
• Proficiency or experience with Python.
• Extensive experience using machine learning and data analysis, or similar approaches, to build scalable systems and data-driven products with cross-functional teams.
• A proven track record of building scalable, efficient, automated processes for large-scale data analysis, model development, model validation, and implementation of modern research.
• Experience leading cross-functional machine learning projects across teams.

Technology Environment

• Infrastructure: Kubernetes on AWS EKS, Istio, Datadog, Terraform, Cloudflare, and Helm.
• Backend: Java and Spring Boot microservices built with Gradle, alongside DynamoDB, Kinesis, Airflow, Postgres, PlanetScale, and Redis on AWS.
• Frontend: React, TypeScript, GraphQL, Storybook, Radix UI, Vite, esbuild, and Playwright.
• ML automation: custom and open-source models, Python, Metaflow, Hugging Face, PyTorch, TensorFlow, and pandas.

Compensation and Benefits

• US annual base salary: $320,000–$360,000, plus equity and benefits.
• Salary ranges depend on role, level, and location.
• Perks and benefits include health and wellness offerings and equity.

Application Information

• Candidates are encouraged to apply even if they do not meet every listed requirement; other opportunities may match their experience.
• Applicant data is processed under Attentive's Privacy Policy.
• Contact the recruiter for assistance or reasonable accommodations.