Staff ML Engineer - Leasing AI & Platform

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

Job summary

AppFolio is seeking a Staff Machine Learning Engineer for Leasing in a hybrid setup. You will own the ML strategy, build autonomous leasing agents, and translate research into production features.

You’ll shape architectural decisions, drive evaluation metrics, and ensure production reliability across Leasing systems. You’ll collaborate with Leasing Engineering, Voice & Agents, and Research ML to ship robust ML capabilities at scale, balancing performance with cost and safety in a real estate

Qualifications

• 7+ years of experience developing and scaling web-based applications, preferably in a SaaS environment.
• Systems thinker who focuses on long-term leverage and platform level decisions.
• Production builder with ML infrastructure in production and measurable impact.
• Domain curiosity about leasing workflows and business processes.
• Able to operate in high ambiguity and drive clear directions.
• Ownership mindset with urgency and outcome focus.
• Collaborative, low-ego approach across ML, product and engineering.
• Reliability mindset: SLOs, observability, on-call processes.

Responsibilities

• Own the ML Strategy for Leasing: define the ML roadmap and architecture bets aligned with customer outcomes.
• Drive the Development & Architecture for Autonomous AI Agents shaping leasing workflows.
• Translate research into product: evaluate capabilities and decide what ships.
• Drive model quality and evaluation: build infra for experiments with meaningful metrics.
• Set the ML bar for Leasing Engineering: establish standards for ML integration and tooling.
• Operate with production discipline: ensure reliability, cost discipline, and on-call readiness.

Skills

Systems thinking

Production infra

Owner-operator

Collaboration

Reliability mindset

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS or related

Master's or PhD in CS

Tools

LangChain / LangGraph

RAG patterns

Job description

AppFolio is seeking a Staff Machine Learning Engineer for Leasing in a hybrid setup. You will own the ML strategy, build autonomous leasing agents, and translate research into production features.

You’ll shape architectural decisions, drive evaluation metrics, and ensure production reliability across Leasing systems. You’ll collaborate with Leasing Engineering, Voice & Agents, and Research ML to ship robust ML capabilities at scale, balancing performance with cost and safety in a real estate