AI & ML Staff Engineer

dLocal; Barcelona; On-site; EUR 90,000 - 120,000; Full time

Job summary

dLocal is seeking an AI & ML Staff Engineer in Barcelona to serve as the senior technical reference for building, operating, and evolving our ML infrastructure. You will own the MLOps stack, enable data science teams, and scale AI services from idea to production with reliability and compliance.

You will architect and guide AI-driven automation across feature stores, fraud workflows, and cost optimization, while collaborating with AI squads and engineers to raise the bar for ML effectiveness.

Qualifications

• Own or design MLOps platforms or ML infrastructure used by multiple teams.
• Strong background in distributed systems and data/stream processing (e.g., Spark, Flink).
• Experience building production-grade ML pipelines, including experiment tracking and model lifecycle management.
• Hands-on experience with production ML workloads on Databricks, including Feature Store.
• Familiarity with cloud-based ML platforms (SageMaker, Vertex AI) and container deployments.
• Strong observability skills for ML systems (metrics, logs, traces, drift).
• Able to communicate with both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Experience rolling out AI assistants or copilots is a plus.
• Exposure to LLM and AI infrastructure is a plus.
• Past responsibilities as Tech Lead or Architect are a plus.
• Contributions to internal standards or RFCs are a plus.

Responsibilities

• Define and evolve the end-to-end ML platform architecture used by multiple squads.
• Design reproducible training pipelines, experiment tracking, and model packaging with safe rollout strategies.
• Balance reliability, performance, and cost for ML workloads in collaboration with SRE/Infra and FinOps.
• Act as go-to expert for MLOps questions on pipelines, serving patterns, monitoring, and rollbacks.
• Review designs and deployments for new models ensuring platform standards and non-functional requirements.
• Partner with Fraud/Anomaly teams to set SLAs/SLOs and logging for ML components.
• Contribute to on-call readiness with playbooks, dashboards, and incident reviews.
• Define infrastructure and guardrails to safely consume AI services built by the AI team.
• Design tooling to automate ML workflows with AI and agents (Feature Store, training/eval pipelines).
• Contribute to evaluation, observability, and safety for AI-powered automations.
• Governance: model/data access control, PII handling, auditability of changes and runtime behavior.
• Work with InfoSec to align platform with regulatory requirements.
• Mentor MLOps and Data/ML engineers on system design and CI/CD.

Skills

MLOps platforms

Distributed systems

ML pipelines

Databricks

Cloud ML platforms

Observability

Communication

AI copilots

LLM infra

Tech Lead

Tools

Databricks

MLflow

SageMaker

Vertex AI

Unity Catalog

Job description

dLocal started with one goal – to close the payments innovation gap between global enterprise companies, and customers in emerging economies. We have over 1000 payment methods, in more than 60 countries. We are relentlessly focusing on serving our customers and solidifying our position as the preferred infrastructure solution for Global Merchants across Emerging Markets. With the ability to accept local payment methods and facilitate cross-border fund settlement worldwide, our merchants reach billions of underserved consumers in the high-growth markets of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. dLocal offers the ideal payment solutions for global commerce.

• Payins: Accept local payment methods
• Payouts: Compliantly send funds cross-border
• dLocal for Platforms: Unify your platform’s payment solution

About dLocal

dLocal started with one goal – to close the payments innovation gap between global enterprise companies, and customers in emerging economies. We have over 1000 payment methods, in more than 60 countries. We are relentlessly focusing on serving our customers and solidifying our position as the preferred infrastructure solution for Global Merchants across Emerging Markets. With the ability to accept local payment methods and facilitate cross-border fund settlement worldwide, our merchants reach billions of underserved consumers in the high-growth markets of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. dLocal offers the ideal payment solutions for global commerce.

• Payins: Accept local payment methods
• Payouts: Compliantly send funds cross-border
• dLocal for Platforms: Unify your platform’s payment solution
• Defense Suite: Manage fraud effectively

Financial technology for markets of the future.

We’re looking for an AI & ML Staff Engineerto serve as the senior technical reference for how we build, operate, and evolve our ML and AI infrastructure. Your mission is to enable Data Science and AI teams to take models and AI-powered services from idea to production in a reliable, observable, and compliant way. You will own the technical direction of our MLOps stack, introduce AI safely into our engineering workflows, and help the team scale its impact as usage and complexity grow.

A core part of this role is to use agents and AI services to automate as much as possible of what we do in MLOps — from feature store and platform operations to fraud/anomaly workflows and ML cost optimization — working side by side with the AI team. This is a hands‑on architecture and leadership role: you won’t own product models yourself, but you will deeply influence how every model and AI component is trained, deployed, monitored, and run in production.

What will I be doing?

• Technical Strategy & Architecture: Define and evolve the end-to-end ML platform architecture (data, training, registry, serving, monitoring, governance) used by multiple squads.
• Design standard patterns for reproducible training pipelines, experiment tracking, model packaging, versioning, promotion flows (dev → staging → production), and online/batch inference with safe rollout strategies (canary, shadow, rollback).
• Balance reliability, performance, and cost for ML workloads, working closely with SRE/Infra and Finance/FinOps.
• Day-to-Day MLOps Enablement: Act as the go-to expert for complex MLOps questions regarding pipeline structure, serving patterns, monitoring, and rollbacks.
• Review and challenge designs and deployments for new models and data pipelines, ensuring adherence to platform standards and non-functional requirements.
• Partner with Fraud, Anomaly, and other product squads to establish clear SLAs/SLOs for ML components, as well as proper logging, metrics, and alerts.
• Contribute to on-call readiness, including playbooks, dashboards, incident reviews, and continuous operational improvement.
• AI Infrastructure & AI‑Assisted Operations: Define infrastructure, contracts, and guardrails to safely consume and extend agents and AI services built by the AI team.
• Design patterns and tooling to automate MLOps workflows using AI and agents (e.g., feature platform operations, training/eval pipelines, alert triage in Fraud/Anomaly, and platform FinOps/cost optimization).
• Contribute to evaluation, observability, and safety for AI‑powered automations (prompts, policies, redaction, auditability) alongside dedicated AI teams.
• Governance, Security & Compliance: Set and maintain technical standards for model/data access control, PII handling, redaction, environment separation, and auditability of model changes and runtime behavior.
• Work with InfoSec and Architecture to align the platform with regulatory and internal requirements.
• Leadership & Collaboration: Mentor MLOps and Data/ML engineers on system design, reliability, observability, CI/CD, testing, and rollback practices.
• Lead design and architecture reviews to de-risk decisions and collaborate closely with Data Science, AI, SRE/Infra, and Product/Engineering leaders.

What skills do I need?

• Solid experience owning or designing MLOps platforms or ML infrastructure used by multiple teams.
• Strong background in distributed systems and data/stream processing (e.g., Spark, Flink, or similar technologies).
• Experience building production‑grade ML pipelines, including experiment tracking, reproducible training, model registries, CI/CD for models/data, and online/batch inference at scale.
• Strong hands‑on experience building and operating production ML workloads on Databricks, including feature engineering/Feature Store (ideally with Unity Catalog), MLflow experiment tracking and model lifecycle management, and batch/real‑time model deployment.
• Familiarity with cloud-based ML platforms (e.g., SageMaker, Vertex AI) and container‑based deployments.
• Strong understanding of observability for ML systems, including metrics, logs, traces, data/model drift, freshness, and quality checks.
• Ability to communicate clearly with technical and non‑technical stakeholders, translating infrastructure and AI/ML trade‑offs into business language.
• Experience rolling out AI assistants (code or infra copilots, AI log analysis) inside engineering organizations, including policies and best practices, is a plus.
• Exposure to LLM and AI infrastructure (gateways, vector stores, evaluation harnesses) is a plus.
• Prior responsibilities as a Technical Referent, Tech Lead, or Architect for platforms or shared services is a plus.
• Contributions to internal standards, RFCs, guilds, or tech communities is a plus.

How you’ll work

You’ll partner with Data Science, AI, SRE, Infra, and Product leadership to make our ML and AI platforms easier to operate, scalable, and safe to evolve. You’ll balance hands‑on architecture and engineering delivery with clear technical standards, operational excellence, and continuous enablement across squads.