Remote Senior ML Scientist — AVM Leader

Kiavi Funding, Inc.; United States; Remote; USD 175,000 - 225,000; Full time

Job summary

Kiavi is seeking a Senior Applied Scientist to lead end-to-end development of automated valuation models (AVMs) and ML systems for real estate lending. This senior IC/technical leader role emphasizes production ML, complex modeling, and cross-functional collaboration with engineering, Product, Credit Risk, and Capital Markets.

You will mentor colleagues, drive strategic ML initiatives from research to production, and shape data architectures for scalable decisioning in a fully remote, US-based

Qualifications

• Ph.D. or Master's degree in a quantitative discipline with 5+ years of industry experience building and deploying ML models in production.
• Proven track record of developing statistical and machine learning models at an account, customer, or real estate asset level.
• Strong production-level programming in Python, SQL, and R.
• Demonstrated experience in technical leadership, cross-functional collaboration, and mentoring junior team members.
• Excellent oral and written communication skills with the ability to explain complex technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Lead the end-to-end design, architecture, development, and deployment of AVM systems for novel lending products.
• Architect and refine ML, deep learning, and statistical models for asset valuation, incorporating spatial-temporal trends, macroeconomic factors, market liquidity, and property risk dynamics.
• Establish robust quantitative frameworks for continuous model performance assessment, monitoring, and automated retraining across changing real estate cycles.
• Build analytical tools and frameworks to empower cross-functional teams across risk, underwriting, and capital markets.
• Partner closely with data infrastructure and MLOps engineering teams to drive initiatives that enhance data capabilities, build feature stores, and streamline real-time inference infrastructure.
• Design useful data attributes and feature representations, leveraging structured, unstructured, and multimodal data sources (e.g., property photos, listing descriptions, spatial features).
• Perform exploratory data analysis, evaluate frontier AI capabilities, and make strategic recommendations to improve current decisioning frameworks and valuation accuracy.
• Refactor and optimize existing analytical solutions and algorithmic components to improve scalability, reliability, and execution efficiency.

Skills

Python

SQL

R

Leadership

Mentoring

Communication

Education

Master's or Ph.D. in a quantitative field

Tools

Spark

PyTorch

TensorFlow

AWS/GCP

Job description

Kiavi is seeking a Senior Applied Scientist to lead end-to-end development of automated valuation models (AVMs) and ML systems for real estate lending. This senior IC/technical leader role emphasizes production ML, complex modeling, and cross-functional collaboration with engineering, Product, Credit Risk, and Capital Markets.

You will mentor colleagues, drive strategic ML initiatives from research to production, and shape data architectures for scalable decisioning in a fully remote, US-based