Technical Lead Manager, AI Platform - Lead ML & Matching

Paraform, Inc.; San Francisco, Northern (CA, KY); Hybrid; USD 250,000 - 420,000; Full time

Job summary

Paraform is hiring a Staff-level ML leader to own the AI Platform engineering team in San Francisco, guiding applied AI/ML engineers while staying hands-on on core ML work. You will own the matching, ranking, and agentic systems that decide which recruiter sees which role, which candidate reaches which company, and how hiring automation scales for customers.

This role emphasizes outcomes over output and technical excellence.

Qualifications

• Staff-level IC depth in ML or applied AI: you're the person others pull in when the problem is genuinely hard, and you've stayed technical while leading.
• 1+ years managing or formally tech-leading engineers (Tech Lead Manager) or 4+ years including setting technical direction across multiple teams (Technical Director).
• You've shipped production ML or LLM systems used by real people at scale: retrieval, ranking, recommendation, agentic workflows, or similar.
• Eval-driven: you know how to measure model quality against business outcomes, not just offline benchmarks, and you can tell a real win from noise.
• Data-fluent: you can pull your own SQL, sanity-check an experiment readout, and push back on a bad metric.
• AI fluency is a floor here, not a differentiator. You use AI tools in your own work and you know how to raise a team's leverage with them.

Responsibilities

• Own the AI Platform engineering team; hire, coach, and level a pod of applied AI and ML engineers.
• Lead core ML work: data/labeling strategy, feature/embedding design, model selection, training, and fine-tuning.
• Tackle challenging modeling problems (ranking, offline eval, cold-start) and ship fixes.
• Own matching and ranking systems: retrieval, ranking, and personalization across the marketplace.
• Develop agentic systems (LLM-powered workflows) and ensure reliability for recruiters and operators.
• Own evaluation frameworks measuring quality, reliability, and business impact in production.
• Balance tool choice: decide when to deploy LLM vs traditional ML for efficiency and cost.

Skills

Staff-level ML

Team leadership

Production ML systems

Eval-driven

Data fluency

AI tooling proficiency

Technical writing

Tools

SQL

Job description

Paraform is hiring a Staff-level ML leader to own the AI Platform engineering team in San Francisco, guiding applied AI/ML engineers while staying hands-on on core ML work. You will own the matching, ranking, and agentic systems that decide which recruiter sees which role, which candidate reaches which company, and how hiring automation scales for customers.

This role emphasizes outcomes over output and technical excellence.