Kikoff
Staff Machine Learning Engineer
$336K–$392K
San Francisco +1 · Staff · Full-time · Posted Sep 4, 2026
- Location
- San Francisco
San Francisco, California, United States - Experience
- 8+ years software or ML engineering, including 5+ years building, deploying, and operating ML systems in production.
- Education
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, Statistics, or a related field; advanced degree preferred.
About the job
Sets Kikoff’s machine learning strategy and owns its ML platform and production models across underwriting, fraud and risk, and personalization.
What you'll do
- Define the ML roadmap and build, operate, and govern the company’s ML platform and systems.
- Lead high-impact underwriting and cash advance models end to end, from problem framing through launch and iteration.
- Set standards for model risk, experimentation, and engineering; partner across functions and mentor engineers.
What they ask for
- 8+ years of software or machine learning engineering experience, including 5+ years building, deploying, and operating production ML systems; prior technical-lead or most-senior-ML-engineer experience.
- Expert-level Python; strong software engineering and system design skills; deep production ML lifecycle experience.
- Experience designing ML platform components and using gradient-boosted trees and classical ML for tabular data.
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, Statistics, or a related field.
Nice to have
- Consumer lending, credit underwriting, fraud, or payments experience; experience with Ruby/Rails backends or Risk/Compliance model approval processes.
- Advanced degree.
Pay
$336,000 — $392,000 USD base salary
Tools
Python, PyTorch, AWS, GCP, Docker, Kubernetes, Ruby/Rails
AI focus
Develops and governs production ML models for credit underwriting, fraud and risk, and personalization, including model evaluation, explainability, and monitoring.
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative