AI & ML Staff Engineer

dLocal; Madrid; On-site; EUR 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

dLocal is seeking an AI & ML Staff Engineer to be the senior technical reference for building and operating our ML and AI infrastructure. You will enable Data Science and AI teams to take models from idea to production in a reliable, observable, and compliant way.

You will own the technical direction of our MLOps stack and help scale usage and complexity. This hands-on architecture and leadership role includes using agents and AI services to automate MLOps, define guardrails, and partner with

Qualifications

• Experience owning or designing MLOps platforms used by multiple teams.
• Strong background in distributed systems and data processing.
• Experience building production-grade ML pipelines with tracking.
• Hands-on experience with Databricks and MLflow.
• Familiarity with cloud ML platforms (SageMaker, Vertex AI).
• Ability to communicate with technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Experience rolling out AI assistants in engineering orgs is a plus.
• Exposure to LLM/AI infrastructure is a plus.
• Prior leadership roles on platforms or shared services is a plus.

Responsibilities

• Define and evolve end-to-end ML platform architecture.
• Design reproducible training pipelines and model packaging.
• Balance reliability, performance, and cost for ML workloads.
• Act as go-to expert for MLOps questions.
• Review designs and deployments for new models.
• Partner with Fraud/Anomaly teams to establish SLAs/SLOs.
• Contribute to on-call readiness and incident reviews.
• Define infrastructure and guardrails for agents/AI services.
• Automate MLOps workflows using AI and agents.
• Contribute to evaluation, observability, and safety for AI automations.
• Work with InfoSec to align platform with requirements.
• Lead design reviews with Data Science, AI, SRE/Infra, and leaders.

Skills

MLOps platforms

Distributed systems

ML pipelines

Observability

Stakeholder communication

Technical leadership

LLM/AI infrastructure

Tools

Databricks

MLflow

Unity Catalog

SageMaker

Vertex AI

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.