Staff ML Engineer: Autonomous Leasing AI Leader

Appfolio; Santa Barbara (CA); On-site; USD 200,000 - 275,000; Full time

Job summary

AppFolio is seeking a Staff Machine Learning Engineer to own the ML strategy for Realm-X Leasing Performer, shaping how it reasons, acts, and learns while ensuring reliability and cost efficiency. You will collaborate with Leasing Eng, Voice & Agents, and Research ML to translate prototypes into production-ready systems.

This role sits at the intersection of applied ML, agent systems, and leasing domain expertise, driving observable outcomes for customers.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of experience developing and scaling web-based applications, preferably in a SaaS environment.
• Systems thinker with platform mindset and long-term leverage.
• Production ML infrastructure experience with measurable impact.

Responsibilities

• Own the ML strategy for Leasing and define the roadmap across Leasing products.
• Lead the architecture for autonomous AI agents and its evaluation framework.
• Translate research into production-ready features for customer use.
• Build evaluation and experimentation infra to ship ML changes confidently.
• Set patterns and practices for ML in Leasing Engineering (prompting, RAG, model selection).
• Ensure production ML systems meet reliability and cost discipline.

Skills

ML strategy

Production ML infra

LangChain

LangGraph

RAG patterns

Autonomous agents

System design

SaaS

Reliability

Education

7+ years SaaS experience

Tools

LangChain

LangGraph

vLLM

TensorRT

Triton

Job description

AppFolio is seeking a Staff Machine Learning Engineer to own the ML strategy for Realm-X Leasing Performer, shaping how it reasons, acts, and learns while ensuring reliability and cost efficiency. You will collaborate with Leasing Eng, Voice & Agents, and Research ML to translate prototypes into production-ready systems.

This role sits at the intersection of applied ML, agent systems, and leasing domain expertise, driving observable outcomes for customers.