ML Platform Lead – Real-Time Inference & Scale

Tala; New York (NY); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Tala is seeking a Manager, Machine Learning Engineering to lead Tala’s ML Platform team. This player-coach role will drive architecture, reliability, and production ML systems while growing a team of 4–6 engineers.

You will own priorities across the product roadmap, collaborate with Data Science, Data Platform, and Business teams, and focus on real-time inference, streaming data, and scalable model deployment.

Qualifications

• 2+ years of directly managing engineers, including hiring, performance management, coaching, and career development
• Experience managing a team through at least one full performance cycle
• Willingness to be actively involved in sourcing, interviewing, and closing engineering talent
• Experience with production on-call, incident response, and capacity planning
• Strong understanding of software quality, security, reliability, testing, and production operations
• Experience building and operating machine learning or causal inference systems in production
• At least 3 years of hands-on Python experience
• 6+ years of backend software engineering experience in consumer-scale applications

Responsibilities

• Lead and grow a team of 4–6 Machine Learning Engineers
• Own prioritization across product roadmap work, run-the-business activities, and operational excellence
• Guide architecture and production systems for real-time inference and streaming data
• Drive engineering best practices: testing, automation, observability, deployment
• Collaborate with Data Science, Data Engineering, and Business teams to translate needs into scalable ML platform solutions
• Coach engineers toward growth and promotions and manage performance gaps
• Ensure reliable on-call health, capacity planning, and incident response
• Partner with tech leads to estimate and scope complex work

Skills

Team management

Hiring & mentoring

Performance coaching

SLOs & incident response

Python programming

Backend software engineering

Architecture & system design

Observability

Data platform collaboration

Capacity planning

Tools

AWS

GCP

Azure

Kubernetes

Docker

Kafka

Kinesis

Beam

Flink

Spark Streaming

Airflow

Metaflow

Jupyter

Pandas

Scikit-Learn

XGBoost

TensorFlow

PyTorch

Hugging Face

MySQL

PostgreSQL

Cassandra

Snowflake

Druid

Job description

Tala is seeking a Manager, Machine Learning Engineering to lead Tala’s ML Platform team. This player-coach role will drive architecture, reliability, and production ML systems while growing a team of 4–6 engineers.

You will own priorities across the product roadmap, collaborate with Data Science, Data Platform, and Business teams, and focus on real-time inference, streaming data, and scalable model deployment.