Principal Software Engineer, Core Pricing
Principal Software Engineer driving technical vision for Upstart's Core Pricing platform. Lead design of large-scale ML-powered systems to optimize loan pricing, borrower-lender matching, and marketplace efficiency for personal and unsecured loans.
About the job
Responsibilities
- Define the long-term technical direction and roadmap for Pricing in alignment with Upstart’s business objectives.
- Lead the design and development of a system that continuously optimizes the matching of supply and demand for Upstart’s borrower-lender marketplace.
- Work closely with ML scientists to improve and develop new models that improve core business metrics.
- Guide the architectural evolution of Pricing engineering systems with an emphasis on scaling innovation across multiple engineering teams.
- Uncover and drive alignment across complex technical requirements, designs, trade-offs, influencing product direction.
- Proactively evaluate, prototype, and roll out new technologies/frameworks to help cultivate a culture of innovation.
- Lead from the front, while mentoring and developing technical leaders.
Requirements
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or Mathematics, or a related field (or its equivalent) + 8 years of experience.
- Experience building highly scalable systems using containerization technologies like Docker and Kubernetes.
- Experience building flexible, extensible and consistent APIs.
- Solid grasp of software development principles and best practices for creating scalable, extensible and maintainable systems.
- Proficiency in one or more object oriented programming languages like Python, Java, C#, C++.
- Strong communication skills and ability to explain complex business and technical concepts to all audiences.
- Track record of successfully mentoring and developing technical leaders.
- Experience working in dynamic fast paced organizations.
- Ability to balance the needs of the business with the needs of engineering improvements.
- Passion for clean code and architecture and initiative to “level-up” the engineering team with better practices & design.
- You are able lead and resolve company-wide technical discussions and are able to collaborate and include input from cross-functional teams (security, devops, data, compliance and product).
- You have a good sense for build-vs-buy and are able to prioritize the highest ROI architectural investments.
Nice-to-Haves
- High proficiency with Python.
- Experience with A/B testing, GRPC, and Kafka.
- Experience working in Fintech, Pricing, Ads, or ML.
- Background in statistics, mathematics, or econometrics is a big plus.
- Experience designing and building microservice-based architectures.
- Experience developing large scale distributed systems in AWS.
- Strong sense of ownership and accountability for the quality and timely delivery of work.
- Ability to thrive both in self-directed work environments and in collaborative settings, contributing positively to team dynamics.
- Demonstrated ability to take feedback well and actively incorporate it into work with a desire to continuously improve.
- Ability to influence and lead without direct authority.
- Strong product and analytical mindset that allows you to think in terms of ROI, risk, and trade offs.
- Experience working at companies that have gone through periods of rapid business or organizational growth.
Skills
Python, Java, Kubernetes, Docker, AWS, gRPC, Kafka, Microservices, A/B Testing
Similar jobs
ML Engineering jobs
PointClickCare
United States
Leads the technical vision, architecture, and engineering standards for a company-wide ML platform supporting model development, deployment, serving, and monitoring. The role requires principal-level expertise in Python and Java, scalable MLOps, cloud infrastructure, security, and technical leadership across teams.
San Francisco, CA
Principal technical leader defining architecture and multi-year strategy for Pinterest’s Homefeed, Search, and AI Assistant experiences. The role requires 15+ years of large-scale systems or machine-learning experience, deep expertise in discovery and generative AI, and hands-on leadership across engineering and product organizations.
Rula
United States
Own the architecture and delivery of production AI systems for patient-provider matching, search relevance, personalization, clinical workflows, and engagement. The role requires extensive software engineering, distributed systems, search or recommendation, ML applications, and foundation-model experience in a regulated healthcare setting.
Zoox
Foster City, CA
Leads the technical strategy and engineering execution required to achieve driverless freeway operation for autonomous vehicles. Requires 10+ years of software experience, demonstrated freeway autonomy leadership, deep expertise in an autonomy domain, and strong executive communication skills.
Fetch
United States
Design and scale ML infrastructure and real-time learning systems powering personalization, search, ranking, and ad tech for millions of consumers. The role requires deep distributed-systems and data-pipeline expertise, strong architecture leadership, and experience delivering zero-to-one ML systems.