Staff ML Engineer — Autonomous Leasing Agent

AppFolio Inc; California; On-site; USD 200,000 - 275,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

Job summary

AppFolio Inc is seeking a Staff Machine Learning Engineer in California to own ML strategy and execution for the Realm-X Leasing Performer. You will collaborate with Leasing Engineering, Voice & Agents, and Research ML to scale prototypes into reliable systems.

You will shape how the leasing agent reasons, acts, and learns while ensuring cost efficiency and safe operation at scale. This is a hands-on leadership role with cross-functional impact.

Qualifications

• ML development at scale in production environments.
• Architectural leadership in system design and decisions.
• Experience training/fine-tuning language models end-to-end.
• Hands-on experience with RAG patterns and agents.
• Experience operating AI guardrails and authorization layers.

Responsibilities

• Own the ML strategy for Leasing and define the ML roadmap across Leasing products.
• Lead development and architecture for autonomous AI agents powering the Leasing Performer.
• Translate research into product: evaluate capabilities and ship-ready features.
• Build evaluation infrastructure to measure ML changes and outcomes.
• Establish patterns, standards, and practices for ML in Leasing Engineering.
• Ensure production ML systems meet reliability, observability, and cost discipline.

Skills

7+ years experience

Systems thinking

Production ML infrastructure

Domain understanding: leasing

Ambiguity tolerance

Owner-operator mentality

Collaboration across ML, product, eng

Reliability mindset (SLOs, observab.)

Sustainability & work-life balance

Education

Bachelor’s, Master’s, or Ph.D. in CS or related

Tools

LangChain / LangGraph

Job description

AppFolio Inc is seeking a Staff Machine Learning Engineer in California to own ML strategy and execution for the Realm-X Leasing Performer. You will collaborate with Leasing Engineering, Voice & Agents, and Research ML to scale prototypes into reliable systems.

You will shape how the leasing agent reasons, acts, and learns while ensuring cost efficiency and safe operation at scale. This is a hands-on leadership role with cross-functional impact.