Senior Scala ML Systems Engineer

Braintrust; United States; Remote; USD 110,000 - 116,000; Full time

Job summary

Etsy is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to build and run its ML orchestration platform. You will enable every ML request—across search, recommendations, ads, and generative AI—to run with high availability and low latency.

The role requires deep experience in distributed systems, Scala or functional languages, Kubernetes operations, and strong collaboration with internal users to shape reliable ML tooling and production workflows.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of software engineering experience building and operating distributed, low-latency production services.
• Experience with Scala or another functional programming language and comfort with functional patterns such as immutability, composition, and effect or concurrency libraries.
• A solid understanding of how ML inference works in production: model serving, feature retrieval, batching, latency and throughput trade-offs, and how predictive and transformer-based models are deployed and evaluated.
• Hands-on experience operating services on Kubernetes, including deployments, scaling, resource management, and debugging in production.
• Experience designing service APIs and request-routing or orchestration systems (e.g., gRPC, queues).
• Strong operational skills: metrics, tracing, alerting, on-call ownership, and performance profiling.
• A product mindset and strong communication skills. You enjoy working with internal users to understand their needs.

Responsibilities

• Build and operate Etsy's ML orchestration platform that handles all ML requests across services such as search, recommendations, ads, and generative AI use cases.
• Develop high-availability, low-latency services and continuously improve reliability and performance.
• Collaborate with Applied Scientists, Data Enablement, model serving, and product engineering to ship features safely and self-service.
• Drive API design, orchestration patterns, and production-grade instrumentation across teams.

Skills

Distributed systems

Scala

Functional programming

Kubernetes

API design

Observability

Communication

ML inference

Tools

gRPC

KServe

Triton

vLLM

Cats Effect

ZIO

Akka

http4s

Job description

Etsy is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to build and run its ML orchestration platform. You will enable every ML request—across search, recommendations, ads, and generative AI—to run with high availability and low latency.

The role requires deep experience in distributed systems, Scala or functional languages, Kubernetes operations, and strong collaboration with internal users to shape reliable ML tooling and production workflows.