Senior ML Data Enablement Lead (Remote)

Upstart; Northern (KY); Hybrid; USD 195,000 - 270,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Remote work

Bonus opportunities

Equity compensation

Job summary

Upstart, a leading AI lending marketplace, is seeking a Sr. Engineering Manager - ML Data Enablement to lead the data lifecycle from integration to inference.

You will shape strategy, partner with ML, Procurement, Data Platform, and product engineering to turn data into a durable competitive advantage. The role emphasizes data contracts, quality, and scalable infrastructure, with responsibilities across third-party onboarding, metadata coverage, and handling high-value datasets.

Qualifications

• Owned production data pipelines enabling offline training and online inference.
• Experience building and scaling data systems in modern stacks (e.g., Databricks/Spark, Python, SQL, AWS, streaming systems, orchestration frameworks) and distributed systems architecture.
• Proven ownership of complex cross-functional initiatives spanning engineering, ML, and business stakeholders.
• Experience designing and enforcing data quality frameworks and observability for production systems, including reconciliation, drift detection, and incident/postmortem operating loops.

Responsibilities

• Build and lead a data enablement team spanning data integration and ML-critical data infrastructure.
• Set and execute a technical strategy aligned to measurable north star metrics such as increasing data evaluation velocity and reducing time to production.
• Drive robust data quality and reconciliation frameworks, including retro vs. production checks, ingress-level monitoring, and drift detection to prevent launch issues and downstream model degradation.
• Champion a company-wide shift toward data contracts and SLAs, ensuring data producers adopt clear ownership, quality standards, and monitoring practices for ML-critical datasets.
• Establish clear end-to-end ownership across the third-party and internal data lifecycle, eliminating fragmented workflows and implicit accountability.
• Accelerate third-party data onboarding by operationalizing standardized vendor intake, secure retro ingestion, templated integrations, and configurable microservices that reduce engineering lift and cycle time.
• Unlock internal data for ML innovation by improving metadata coverage, lineage standards, ownership contracts, and ML discoverability across high-impact internal domains

Skills

Data integration experience

Leadership experience

Cross-functional collaboration

Data quality and observability

Education

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science / Engineering / Math

Tools

Databricks/Spark

Python

SQL

AWS

Streaming systems

Orchestration frameworks

Job description

Upstart, a leading AI lending marketplace, is seeking a Sr. Engineering Manager - ML Data Enablement to lead the data lifecycle from integration to inference.

You will shape strategy, partner with ML, Procurement, Data Platform, and product engineering to turn data into a durable competitive advantage. The role emphasizes data contracts, quality, and scalable infrastructure, with responsibilities across third-party onboarding, metadata coverage, and handling high-value datasets.