Senior Backend Engineer - Real-Time ML Forecasting

The Briefed; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 148,000 - 185,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Healthcare coverage

Mental health support

Parental leave 18 weeks

Remote work flexibility 4 weeks/year

Lyft credits & commuter benefits

Job summary

Lyft is seeking a Senior Software Engineer for the Forecasting and Real‑Time Optimization Platform (FORTOP) to own production grade streaming pipelines and ML inference systems. You will collaborate with data scientists and downstream teams to forecast rider demand and driver supply, especially during peak events and holidays.

You will drive end-to-end technical leadership, design scalable architectures, and build tools for online experimentation, rollout, and incident response.

Qualifications

• BS/MS in Computer Science, Computer Engineering or related field, or equivalent.
• Proven track record delivering and operating large distributed systems.
• Experience leading multi-engineer projects and teams.

Responsibilities

• Lead multi-engineer projects from design to launch.
• Architect streaming feature pipelines and inference workflows.
• Build tooling for rollout, backtesting, and experimentation.
• Define data contracts and SLAs between forecasting signals and downstream systems.
• Monitor latency, freshness, error rates, and signal quality; participate in on-call.
• Write maintainable code, conduct reviews, and mentor engineers.

Skills

5+ years experience

Distributed systems

Technical leadership

Mentorship

ML systems

Streaming data

Education

Bachelor's or Master's in CS/Engineering

Tools

Apache Flink

Apache Beam

Apache Spark

Apache Kafka

AWS Kinesis

Job description

Lyft is seeking a Senior Software Engineer for the Forecasting and Real‑Time Optimization Platform (FORTOP) to own production grade streaming pipelines and ML inference systems. You will collaborate with data scientists and downstream teams to forecast rider demand and driver supply, especially during peak events and holidays.

You will drive end-to-end technical leadership, design scalable architectures, and build tools for online experimentation, rollout, and incident response.