Principal ML Engineer — Autonomous Real Estate AI

AppFolio Inc; Goleta (CA); On-site; USD 264,000 - 363,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Benefits eligibility

Discretionary bonuses

Job summary

AppFolio Inc. in Goleta, CA seeks a Principal Machine Learning Engineer to lead mission-critical AI capabilities for Realm-X and autonomous RPM.

You will define architecture for AI systems, design multi-agent orchestration, and advance RL optimization of LLMs and SLMs, delivering high-performance, low-latency production solutions.

This onsite role requires 10+ years of ML/AI experience and a PhD or MS, with strong Python, PyTorch, AWS, and data-driven decision making.

Qualifications

• Advanced degree required in CS/ML or related field.
• 10+ years building ML/AI software systems or equivalent impact.
• Production systems experience with ML/AI.

Responsibilities

• Define technical vision and architecture for AI systems across Realm-X.
• Design and deploy advanced AI agentic systems combining reasoning, planning, and execution.
• Build multi-agent orchestration across maintenance, leasing, accounting, and collections.
• Create platform primitives for context-aware, action-oriented automation.
• Raise end-to-end ML standards across data collection, model training, evaluation, deployment, and inference infrastructure.
• Architect and build scalable multi-modal, real-time AI applications with strong deployment quality.
• Drive AppFolio's transition toward autonomous property management operations using existing LLMs while instrumenting proprietary data collection for targeted training, fine-tuning, and RL optimization of open-source LLMs and SLMs for RPM.

Skills

ML/AI system design

Multi-agent systems

RL optimization

Python

PyTorch

AWS

Docker

SQL

RAG

LangChain

LangGraph

LangSmith

Copilot

ChatGPT

Education

Master's or Ph.D. in CS/ML or related field

Tools

Docker

AWS

SFT

RLHF

DPO

LLMs

SLMs

Copilot

ChatGPT

Job description

AppFolio Inc. in Goleta, CA seeks a Principal Machine Learning Engineer to lead mission-critical AI capabilities for Realm-X and autonomous RPM.

You will define architecture for AI systems, design multi-agent orchestration, and advance RL optimization of LLMs and SLMs, delivering high-performance, low-latency production solutions.

This onsite role requires 10+ years of ML/AI experience and a PhD or MS, with strong Python, PyTorch, AWS, and data-driven decision making.