Senior ML Engineer – End-to-End Production AI (NYC)

DeFi Alliance LLC; New York (NY); On-site; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

DeFi Alliance LLC is seeking a senior machine learning engineer to own end-to-end ML features from requirements to production. You will build and operate production Python systems for data collection, feature extraction, scoring, and AI-assisted research, while ensuring model reliability and observability.

You will work directly with stakeholders and report to the CTO, relocating to NYC if needed to join onsite teams.

Qualifications

• Senior, self-directed ML engineer who can take an ambiguous problem from first experiment through a reliable production release.
• Deep experience with Python and applied machine learning; comfortable moving between data exploration, training code, application code, APIs, and production debugging.
• Strong modeling judgment: problem and label definition, feature design, evaluation, backtesting, leakage, missing data, calibration, interpretability, and model selection.
• Enough software and data engineering depth to ship your own work: build pipelines and services, integrate external APIs, manage model artifacts and schemas, and maintain production workflows without heavy engineering support.
• Practical experience with LLM systems: structured outputs, model and prompt evaluation, observability, retries, cost and latency tradeoffs, and safe handling of untrusted inputs.
• Clear communicator with good product judgment who can work directly with non-technical stakeholders and turn model output into a useful decision or operating tool.
• Extremely high-agency, entrepreneurial, self-driven.
• NYC-based or willing to relocate (non-negotiable).

Responsibilities

• Own applied ML end-to-end: turn a loosely defined problem into dataset, experiment, model, and production system.
• Build and operate production Python systems for data collection, enrichment, feature extraction, scoring, evaluation, and AI-assisted research.
• Develop models people can trust: define labels and features, build evaluation sets and backtests, catch leakage and bad source data, compare approaches, and know when a simpler model is right.
• Move work from the model lab into production: own artifacts, feature and prompt compatibility, APIs, background jobs, observability, failure handling, and releases.
• Improve our LLM systems including structured extraction, research agents, prompt and model evaluation, and guardrails for untrusted data.
• Work directly with stakeholders to decide what is worth building, explain model behavior and tradeoffs, and iterate based on real-world usage.

Skills

Python

Applied machine learning

Production systems

LLM systems

Data pipelines

Model evaluation

Stakeholder communication

Entrepreneurial drive

Relocation willingness

Tools

APIs

Data pipelines

LLM tooling

Job description

DeFi Alliance LLC is seeking a senior machine learning engineer to own end-to-end ML features from requirements to production. You will build and operate production Python systems for data collection, feature extraction, scoring, and AI-assisted research, while ensuring model reliability and observability.

You will work directly with stakeholders and report to the CTO, relocating to NYC if needed to join onsite teams.