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Senior Machine Learning Operations Engineer

167k – 208kSan Francisco, CANew York, NYPortland, ORHybrid5+ YOE
Summary

Build and operate Mercury's real-time ML inference platform for fraud risk decisioning. Own model deployment, observability, and lifecycle tooling with strong backend Python fundamentals.

About the role

Responsibilities

  • Build and operate the real-time inference service that scores models for the risk decision engine, with low latency and high availability as first-class requirements
  • Own model deployment infrastructure — registry and versioning, CI/CD with performance, bias, and consistency checks, shadow mode, and staged rollouts
  • Build model observability: availability, latency, and error monitoring, plus drift detection as a retraining trigger
  • Partner with Risk Data Science to take models from a clean development-to-production handoff through to production operation under MLP ownership
  • Implement experimentation capabilities such as champion/challenger and canary routing, and explainability outputs like SHAP attributions
  • Feel a strong sense of product ownership and actively seek responsibility — self-organize on small and medium projects, and help shape and build a brand-new platform team

Requirements

  • 5+ years in machine learning engineering, backend software engineering, MLOps, or a closely related field
  • Production ML service experience — deploying, serving, and operating models in low-latency, high-availability contexts
  • Strong backend engineering fundamentals in Python, with API frameworks like FastAPI or Flask
  • Experience with model deployment and lifecycle tooling: model registries, CI/CD for models, versioning, and staged rollout patterns (shadow, canary, champion/challenger)
  • Experience building observability and alerting for production services — latency, errors, and ideally model-specific signals like drift
  • Comfort with the data layer ML depends on: SQL, key-value/low-latency stores (Redis, DynamoDB, or equivalent), and streaming pipelines (Kafka, Kinesis, Redpanda, or equivalent)

Nice to Have

  • Familiarity with a modern data stack (Snowflake, dbt, Dagster, Airflow, or similar)
  • Experience operating in a regulated, audit-sensitive, or compliance-adjacent environment
  • Exposure to functional languages or willingness to work across a stack that includes Haskell, React, and TypeScript
Skills
PythonFastAPIFlaskSQLRedisDynamoDBKafkaKinesisRedpandaModel registriesCI/CDObservabilityDrift detectionSHAP
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