Staff Machine Learning Engineer - AI Infra & Production

AppFolio, Inc.; Santa Barbara (CA); Hybrid; USD 200,000 - 275,000; Full time

Job summary

AppFolio, Inc. in Santa Barbara is seeking a Staff Machine Learning Engineer to advance the Realm-X AI platform and ML infrastructure. You will own AWS-based infrastructure, scale models, manage cost, and ensure reliability across providers while collaborating with Voice & Agents and Research ML teams.

You will design training and inference pipelines, implement guardrails, monitor SLOs, and productionize research prototypes for scalable use across customers.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of experience developing and scaling web-based applications.
• Systems thinker with a platform mindset.
• Production ML infrastructure experience.
• Ability to work in high ambiguity and deliver outcomes.
• Ownership mindset with urgency.
• Ability to move fast with sound engineering judgment.
• Collaborative, low-ego, and team-oriented.
• Sustainability and work-life balance.
• Reliability mindset with SLOs and on-call.

Responsibilities

• Design and operate AppFolio's ML infrastructure on AWS — ECS, SageMaker, GPUs, model serving, autoscaling, and cost controls.
• Drive AI cost discipline by optimizing provider routing and inference economics.
• Maintain reliable, multi-provider LLM access with sensible fallbacks.
• Build and maintain training and fine-tuning pipelines for LLMs.
• Productionize research prototypes with SLOs, observability, and on-call rotations.
• Implement AI safety guardrails and authentication for production systems.

Skills

ML infrastructure

Python

Docker

System design

Cost optimization

Ownership

Ambiguity tolerance

Collaboration

Cloud platforms

Tools

AWS

ECS

SageMaker

GPUs

Model Serving

LangChain

Job description

AppFolio, Inc. in Santa Barbara is seeking a Staff Machine Learning Engineer to advance the Realm-X AI platform and ML infrastructure. You will own AWS-based infrastructure, scale models, manage cost, and ensure reliability across providers while collaborating with Voice & Agents and Research ML teams.

You will design training and inference pipelines, implement guardrails, monitor SLOs, and productionize research prototypes for scalable use across customers.