Senior Machine Learning Engineer

Alt; New York (NY); On-site; USD 235,000 - 250,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Work-from-home stipend

Wellness stipend

WeWork office stipend

Flexible vacation

Parental leave

Healthcare benefits

Job summary

Alt is building real-time pricing for the trading-card market. The Senior Machine Learning Engineer will own models from research through production, maturing pricing and underwriting systems that power every buyer, seller, and lender on the platform.

You will lead ML lifecycle, collaborate with domain experts, and push the envelope on automation, accuracy, and scale within a fast-paced startup environment.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of engineering experience with 5+ years building/shipping production ML models.
• Proficiency in production-grade Python and SQL with feature pipelines.
• Experience training/validating gradient-boosted or ensemble estimators.
• Experience leveraging LLMs and AI dev tools in production.
• Experience with MLflow or equivalent for experiments and registry.
• Owns production model-serving on AWS, capacity planning and scaling.
• CI/CD, IaC, and cloud infra provisioning for production workflows.

Responsibilities

• Own pricing and underwriting models from research to production.
• Mature models to production-grade services with accuracy and speed.
• Lead full ML lifecycle: training, feature gen, deployment, monitoring.
• Collaborate with Expert Pricers to inform model improvements.
• Design experiments and backtests to validate new features.
• Own the production AWS infrastructure and low-latency APIs.

Skills

Python

SQL

Feature engineering

Model deployment

AWS

CI/CD

Experiment tracking

LLMs / foundation models

Tools

MLflow

Airflow

Docker

Kubernetes

Job description

Alt is unlocking the value of alternative assets, starting with the $5 B trading-card market. We let collectors buy, sell, vault, and finance their cards in one place and we are backed by leaders at Stripe, Coinbase, Seven Seven Six, and pro athletes like Tom Brady and Giannis Antetokounmpo. Our next frontier is real-time pricing at scale—the Alt Value that powers every trade, loan, and product on the platform.

We're hiring a Senior Machine Learning Engineer who thrives on owning models end-to-end, from research through production. In this role, you'll own productization of Alt's pricing and underwriting models — the systems that turn raw card and market data into the Alt Value and cash advance terms that every buyer, seller, and lender on the platform depends on. You'll be the person who matures models to production-grade services, keeps them accurate and fast at scale, and pushes the boundary of what we can automate.

Why This Role Exists

Alt is at an inflection point — our marketplace is scaling fast, and our pricing intelligence infrastructure has become a genuine competitive moat. We've proven that model-driven pricing works; now we need to push coverage, accuracy, and speed further while bringing down the overhead to run it. This is a high-ownership opportunity to take our pricing and underwriting models from "working" to "excellent" — and to define the ML infrastructure standards that will scale with the company for years to come.

What You’ll Own

• Optimize our pricing models to significantly reduce infrastructure costs while maintaining and improving their accuracy, especially for high-value assets.
• Iterate on our underwriting model to maximize cash advance disbursements while maintaining target risk thresholds and default rates.
• Lead the full ML lifecycle from model training and feature generation to production deployment and monitoring.
• Collaborate closely with our Expert Pricers to become a domain expert in the trading card market and inform model improvements.
• Design and execute experiments and backtesting to discover and validate new features that improve the models’ predictive power and coverage.
• Own the models’ AWS infrastructure, writing code for our pricing APIs to ensure the models can serve at scale and with low latency.

Metrics You’ll Own:

Northstar Metric:

KPIs:

Pricing Accuracy (% Error)

Pricing Freshness (End-to-End Model Orchestration Time)

What Great Looks Like (6 Months)

Shipped leaner, more accurate pricing models.

Moved underwriting from good to great.

Earned trust with Expert Pricers.

Hardened the production path.

Who you are

Must-haves:

• 7+ years of engineering experience, with 5+ years building and shipping production ML/AI models.
• Deep proficiency in production-grade Python and SQL, including building custom feature-engineering pipelines (not just off-the-shelf scikit-learn). Think time-decay weighting, leakage-safe k-fold cross-validation, and cascading fallback/imputation logic.
• Experience training and validating gradient-boosted or ensemble estimators against strict accuracy/error tolerances, with segment-specific tuning (e.g., by category or asset type).
• Experience leveraging LLMs, foundation models, and AI dev tools for both internal tooling and user-facing product use cases in production.
• Experience with MLflow or a comparable tool for experiment tracking and model registry/versioning.
• Comfortable owning production model-serving infrastructure on AWS — capacity planning, auto-scaling, and diagnosing memory/timeout failures at scale.
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines, orchestrating production workflows, and IaC for provisioning and modifying cloud infrastructure.
• Pragmatic and focused on delivering value incrementally rather than pursuing perfection.

Nice-to-haves:

• Experience with real-time or low-latency models serving at scale.
• Previous startup experience — you understand and thrive on the pace, adaptability, and ownership required in a fast‑moving environment.
• Interested in or knowledgeable of trading cards, collectibles, or alternative asset markets.

What You’ll Get From Us

• A seat at the table to help shape the future of Alt and the alternative asset space
• Autonomy and ownership on projects that matter
• $100/month work-from-home stipend
• $200/month wellness stipend
• WeWork office stipend
• Flexible vacation policy
• Generous paid parental leave
• Competitive healthcare benefits, including HSA, for you and your dependent(s)

Base salary range: $235,000-250,000 plus equity. Offers may vary based on experience, location, and other factors.