Staff Machine Learning Engineer: Autonomous Leasing AI

AppFolio; San Diego (CA); On-site; USD 200,000 - 250,000; Full time

Job summary

AppFolio is hiring a Staff Machine Learning Engineer to own the ML strategy and execution for Realm-X Leasing Performer, an autonomous AI agent for end-to-end leasing. You’ll work across Leasing Engineering, Voice & Agents, and Research ML to translate prototypes into dependable systems.

You will shape how the Leasing Performer reasons, acts, and learns, while ensuring reliability, cost efficiency, and safety at scale with a production-first mindset.

Qualifications

• Production ML systems in production with measurable impact.
• Architectural leadership in system design and decision-making.
• End-to-end training or fine-tuning of language models.
• Experience with LangChain / LangGraph and RAG patterns.
• AI safety, guardrails, and authorization layers for production AI.

Responsibilities

• Own the ML strategy and roadmap for Leasing products, aligning with product and engineering leadership.
• Lead the development and architecture of autonomous AI agents powering the leasing workflow.
• Translate research into production features and ship-ready capabilities.
• Build evaluation and experimentation infrastructure to measure model improvements.
• Set patterns and standards for ML across the Leasing Engineering team.
• Ensure production-grade reliability, observability, and cost discipline of ML systems.

Skills

Systems thinker

Production builder

Domain curiosity

Ambiguity

Owner-operator

Collaboration

Reliability mindset

Sustainability

Tools

LangChain

LangGraph

RAG patterns

TensorRT

Triton

Knowledge graphs

Job description

AppFolio is hiring a Staff Machine Learning Engineer to own the ML strategy and execution for Realm-X Leasing Performer, an autonomous AI agent for end-to-end leasing. You’ll work across Leasing Engineering, Voice & Agents, and Research ML to translate prototypes into dependable systems.

You will shape how the Leasing Performer reasons, acts, and learns, while ensuring reliability, cost efficiency, and safety at scale with a production-first mindset.