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# Staff Machine Learning Engineer

- **Company:** AppFolio, Inc.
- **Location:** San Diego, CA, United States
- **Salary:** $200,000.0 - $275,000.0
- **Contract:** Permanent contract
- **Skills:** LangGraph Framework, Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), Artificial Intelligence, Amazon Web Services, Continuous Integration, Python (Programming Language), Machine Learning, Language Modeling, Open Source Technology, Performance Tuning, OpenAI, Software Safety, Systems Integration, Graphics Processing Unit (GPU), Autoscaling, Retrieval-Augmented Generation, Large Language Models, Deep Learning, AWS ECS, Machine Learning Operations, TensorRT, Artificial Intelligence Governance, Google Gemini, Docker
- **Published:** November 4, 2026
- **Apply:** https://www.juju.com/job/7_7D10E758B69C0BE8D12E49236A249434

## About the Role

other production system - SLOs, on-call, observability, postmortems.Must HaveML 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 HaveExperience 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.LocationFind out more about our locations by visiting our site.

## Description

on-call rotations, and observability.AI Safety & Guardrails: Operate AppFolio's AI safety and authorization layer - guardrails on AWS, scoped tool permissions, and human-in-the-loop gates for autonomous agent actions.QualificationsSystems 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