Senior Machine Learning Operations Engineer

Mercury; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 167,000 - 208,000; Full time

Job summary

Mercury is building a high-performance Machine Learning Platform team to streamline real-time risk scoring and production deployment.

We are seeking an engineer with deep ML/ backend expertise to deploy and observe models at scale, enable experimentation, and ensure explainability in production. This role offers ownership of a new platform and a path to broader impact.

Qualifications

• 5+ years in machine learning engineering, backend software engineering, MLOps, or a closely related field.
• Production ML service experience: deploying, serving, and operating models in low-latency, high-availability contexts.
• Strong backend engineering fundamentals in Python, with API frameworks like FastAPI or Flask.
• Experience with model deployment and lifecycle tooling: registries, CI/CD for models, versioning, staged rollout patterns.
• Experience building observability and alerting for production services: latency, errors, drift.

Responsibilities

• Build and operate the real-time inference service that scores models for the risk decision engine, with low latency and high availability.
• Own model deployment infrastructure: registry and versioning, CI/CD with performance, bias, and consistency checks, shadow mode, and staged rollouts.
• Build model observability: availability, latency, and error monitoring, plus drift detection as a retraining trigger.
• Partner with Risk Data Science to take models from dev-to-prod handoff through to production operation under MLP ownership.
• Implement experimentation capabilities such as champion/challenger and canary routing, and explainability outputs like SHAP attributions.
• Contribute to shaping and building a brand-new platform team with a strong sense of product ownership.

Skills

Python

MLOps

CI/CD for models

Backend fundamentals

Observability

Low-latency services

SHAP explainability

Tools

FastAPI

Flask

SQL

Redis

DynamoDB

Kafka

Kinesis

Job description

Mercury's use of machine learning in risk decisioning is growing fast in scope and in stakes. Models increasingly drive real-time decisions about fraud and financial crime, and the Machine Learning Platform (MLP) team exists to build a paved path from a trained model to a reliable production deployment, speeding up iteration, and ensuring granular production observability.

MLP owns the production ML lifecycle: the systems that take a model from registry through deployment, real-time inference, observability, and retraining. Our Data Science colleagues author and train the models. We build the platform that lets them register, deploy, and observe those models in production without carrying the operational burden themselves. We also serve low-latency, highly available scores to the decision engine that depends on them. The platform supports business decisioning broadly, with our first use cases focused on fraud risk outcomes.

At Mercury, we are committed to crafting an exceptional banking* experience for startups. Our team is passionately focused on ensuring our products create a safe environment that meets the needs of our customers, administrators, and regulators.

• Mercury is a fintech company, not an FDIC-insured bank. Banking services provided through Choice Financial Group and Column N.A., Members FDIC.

As part of this role, you will:

• Build and operate the real-time inference service that scores models for the risk decision engine, with low latency and high availability as first-class requirements
• Own model deployment infrastructure: registry and versioning, CI/CD with performance, bias, and consistency checks, shadow mode, and staged rollouts
• Build model observability: availability, latency, and error monitoring, plus drift detection as a retraining trigger
• Partner with Risk Data Science to take models from a clean development-to-production handoff through to production operation under MLP ownership
• Implement experimentation capabilities such as champion/challenger and canary routing, and explainability outputs like SHAP attributions
• Feel a strong sense of product ownership and actively seek responsibility. We self-organize on small and medium projects, and we want someone excited to help shape and build a brand-new platform team

The ideal candidate for the role has:

• 5+ years in machine learning engineering, backend software engineering, MLOps, or a closely related field
• Production ML service experience: deploying, serving, and operating models in low-latency, high-availability contexts
• Strong backend engineering fundamentals in Python, with API frameworks like FastAPI or Flask
• Experience with model deployment and lifecycle tooling: model registries, CI/CD for models, versioning, and staged rollout patterns (shadow, canary, champion/challenger)
• Experience building observability and alerting for production services: latency, errors, and ideally model-specific signals like drift
• Comfort with the data layer ML depends on: SQL, key-value/low-latency stores (Redis, DynamoDB, or equivalent), and streaming pipelines (Kafka, Kinesis, Redpanda, or equivalent)

Nice to have:

• Familiarity with a modern data stack (Snowflake, dbt, Dagster, Airflow, or similar)
• Experience operating in a regulated, audit-sensitive, or compliance-adjacent environment
• Exposure to functional languages or willingness to work across a stack that includes Haskell, React, and TypeScript

Mercury values diversity & belonging and is proud to be an Equal Employment Opportunity employer. All individuals seeking employment at Mercury are considered without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, age, sex, marital status, ancestry, physical or mental disability, veteran status, gender identity, sexual orientation, or any other legally protected characteristic. We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations throughout the recruitment process for applicants with disabilities or special needs. If you need assistance, or an accommodation, please let your recruiter know once you are contacted about a role.

Total Rewards

The total rewards package at Mercury includes base salary, equity (stock options/RSUs), and benefits.

Our salary and equity ranges are highly competitive within the SaaS and fintech industry and are updated regularly using the most reliable compensation survey data for our industry. New hire offers are made based on a candidate’s experience, expertise, geographic location, and internal pay equity relative to peers.

Our target new hire base salary ranges for this role are the following:

US employees (any location):

$166,600—$208,300 USD

Canadian employees (any location):

$157,400—$196,800 CAD