Machine Learning Engineer

Samson Rose; New York, Northern (NY, KY); Hybrid; USD 140,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Samson Rose is seeking a backend/Ml engineering-focused software engineer to ship ML-powered features in production. You’ll build the infrastructure for personalized experiences, train models, and deploy them into the product.

You’ll work with product, design, mobile, and data partners, moving across the stack and owning the ML-adjacent backend systems’ reliability and performance.

Qualifications

• 3+ years of professional ML engineering experience.
• Hands-on experience training and deploying models.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals and end-to-end product delivery.
• Proficiency in Python with FastAPI/Django/Flask.
• Experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS) and containerized deployments.
• Familiarity with vector stores and ML data pipelines.
• Fluency with modern LLM tooling and agentic patterns.
• CS or math degree or equivalent practical experience.
• Authorized to work in the US without sponsorship.

Responsibilities

• Build and maintain ML-powered backend features.
• Design and ship APIs (FastAPI) exposing ML functionality.
• Develop data pipelines and model serving infrastructure.
• Improve reliability, performance, and scalability of ML-adjacent systems.
• Collaborate with product, design, and data teams across the stack.

Skills

Python

FastAPI

ML Engineering

Distributed Systems

Docker/Kubernetes

AWS

Education

CS degree or equivalent

Tools

LangChain

LangGraph

Vector databases

Job description

About the Company

Our client is a high-growth, AI-forward consumer platform that has already reached millions of users and is scaling fast. Their product blends thoughtful, expert-driven guidance with intelligent technology, and they're building the next generation of that experience now. The team is small, high-ownership, and moves quickly, and we're looking for people who want to build something new and be part of shaping it from the ground up.

The Role

This is not a research or data science role. They're looking for a strong backend engineer with hands-on experience shipping ML-powered features in production. You'll sit at the intersection of backend systems and machine learning, building the infrastructure and services that bring intelligent, personalized experiences to our users.

You should be comfortable training and deploying models, not just calling them through an API. Your primary identity is as a software engineer who writes clean, production-grade code, with the depth to reason about ML systems and bring them to life in the product. You'll work closely with product, design, mobile, and data partners, and we're looking for someone comfortable moving across the stack rather than staying inside a narrow ML lane.

What You'll Own

• Build and improve a RAG-based content recommendation pipeline, with a near-term push toward more agentic, tool-calling behavior
• Train and deploy models directly, this is real ML engineering, not wrapping an API around a model someone else built
• Design and ship APIs (FastAPI preferred) that expose ML functionality to the rest of the product
• Build data pipelines and infrastructure supporting model serving, feature storage, and real-time personalization
• Partner directly and continuously with non-technical product and content teams, proposing solutions rather than just executing a spec
• Stay current on modern LLM techniques and tooling (agentic patterns, tool calling, coding-assistant workflows) and bring that fluency into everyday engineering work
• Own the reliability, performance, and scalability of ML-adjacent backend systems

What You'll Need

• 3+ years of professional ML engineering experience. Senior candidates in the 5 to 10 year range are also a strong fit
• Real, hands-on experience training and deploying models, not just integrating pretrained models via API
• Strong software engineering fundamentals: someone who has shipped end-to-end product work, not spent years narrowly specialized on research or model training
• Python required, with experience in a framework like FastAPI, Django, or Flask
• Experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS preferred) and containerized deployments
• Familiarity with vector databases and the broader data stores and pipelines that support ML workloads
• Current, hands-on fluency with modern LLM tooling and agentic development patterns
• Excellent communication skills, specifically the ability to translate technical tradeoffs for non-technical stakeholders. This is a genuine collaboration role, not order-taking
• Computer science or math degree, or equivalent practical experience
• Must be authorized to work in the US without sponsorship, or a UK citizen if based in the UK

Nice to Have

• Startup experience, ideally on a small team moving at a fast pace
• Personal projects or independent build history alongside professional work
• Experience with LangChain, LangGraph, or similar orchestration frameworks
• Background in recommendation systems, personalization, or content ranking
• Experience at a modern, AI-forward consumer or B2B company (health tech and fintech backgrounds translate well)