Staff ML Engineer - Hybrid Real-Time AI & MLOps Lead

State Farm; Bloomington (IL); Hybrid; USD 160,000 - 220,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Annual bonus

Comprehensive health plan

Retirement benefits

Educational benefits

Paid time off

Job summary

State Farm in Bloomington, IL is seeking a Staff Machine Learning Engineer to architect, build, and scale enterprise‑grade AI/ML systems, with a focus on real‑time decisioning and agentic AI applications.

This role will help develop our NBA and recommendation platform, leveraging Databricks, AWS, and modern AI/ML technologies. Emphasis is on ML systems engineering, architecture, and productionization rather than building models from scratch.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience in ML engineering or related technical disciplines, with demonstrated technical leadership.
• Programming: Expert-level Python and strong SQL; experience with APIs, microservices, and production software development.
• Data Engineering: Expert-level PySpark and Apache Spark; experience building reliable data and feature pipelines.
• Cloud & ML Platforms: Deep hands-on Databricks expertise (Delta Lake, Unity Catalog, Workflows) and strong AWS experience (S3, IAM, compute, and application integration).
• ML Engineering & MLOps: Experience supporting the full production ML lifecycle, including model integration, deployment, serving, monitoring, versioning, and retraining. Familiarity with MLflow and CI/CD.
• Real-Time Decisioning: Experience building low-latency inference services, decisioning APIs, and scalable recommendation systems.
• Agentic AI: Hands-on experience developing LLM-powered or agentic AI applications, including orchestration, tool calling, and enterprise integrations.
• System Architecture: Proven ability to independently architect and deliver complex, reliable enterprise systems.

Responsibilities

• Architect, build, and scale enterprise-grade ML systems, APIs, feature pipelines, and reusable components.
• Architect real-time or near-real-time decisioning systems integrating predictive models, business rules, eligibility, prioritization, and optimization.
• Build feedback mechanisms that capture customer interactions and business outcomes to continuously improve recommendations.
• Develop reliable data and ML pipelines using Python, PySpark, SQL, Databricks, and AWS.
• Implement model deployment, serving, versioning, monitoring, CI/CD, and retraining workflows (MLOps).
• Architect and develop production-grade agentic AI applications, including LLM orchestration and enterprise integrations.
• Lead architecture decisions, establish engineering standards, mentor engineers, and collaborate across teams.

Skills

ML engineering

Python

SQL

PySpark

Spark

Databricks

AWS

MLOps

Real-Time Decisioning

Agentic AI

System Architecture

Tools

Databricks

LangGraph

LangChain

LLM orchestration

Job description

State Farm in Bloomington, IL is seeking a Staff Machine Learning Engineer to architect, build, and scale enterprise‑grade AI/ML systems, with a focus on real‑time decisioning and agentic AI applications.

This role will help develop our NBA and recommendation platform, leveraging Databricks, AWS, and modern AI/ML technologies. Emphasis is on ML systems engineering, architecture, and productionization rather than building models from scratch.