Staff Machine Learning Engineer at Propel

At Propel, our mission is to build modern, respectful, and effective financial tools for low-income Americans. Our vision is that all Americans can make it through every month with dignity and abundance. Over 5 million people use our app, Providers, to manage the benefits they use to keep their family well-fed and healthy, stay up to date on critical government programs, save money and earn income. Read more about the impact of Providers here. Now we’ve expanded further into the financial services space, offering the best banking option for low-income Americans.

Our engineering team is currently 20+ people distributed across the United States. Our team is composed of humble and smart people who repeatedly jump in to support one another. We have a collaborative culture exemplified in our brainstorming, pairing sessions, and hackathons. We communicate in multiple ways, including Slack and Zoom for daily async communication, Notion for documentation, and project management software for backlog and task tracking.

As a machine learning engineer, you’ll have the opportunity to immediately drive a huge, direct impact for Propel! You’ll be spearheading Propel’s work to leverage machine learning algorithms across our teams. You’ll also work on meaningful and complex technical problems that have a positive impact on our users’ lives. You’ll also gain first-hand experience building and maintaining a growing system with millions of users.

Propel is a for-profit software company that holds its social mission at its core. Our investors include Andreessen Horowitz, the Omidyar Network, Kevin Durant, Serena Williams, and Nas. 

What we offer:

• An engineering culture that is humble, motivated, and collaborative 
• Consistent knowledge sharing through projects or bugs demos, Lunch & Learn presentations, and documentation
• A people-first approach to management where we value engineers’ voices, support career development, and offer opportunities for technical growth that interest you
• Meaningful work and a strong shared sense of mission
• A remote first work environment with a dog-friendly office in Downtown Brooklyn and satellite offices in San Francisco and Salt Lake City. The team meets in-person for optional retreats and on-sites.
• 20 Days of PTO
• 4% 401K match
• $10k lifetime spend towards Carrot Fertility
• Excellent Medical, Dental and Vision options
• Free access to Ginger mental health, Gympass, Headspace, One Medical, Rightway, Sofi, and Spring Health
• Fair, equitable, and competitive salaries. Propel believes that everyone should be compensated fairly and equitably. We set our salary ranges using compensation data from hundreds of NYC based startups at our stage. Additionally, pay is not determined based on location. The salary range for this position is $150,000 - $250,000 depending on experience and interview performance. Equity and excellent benefits come with this position as well!

What you will do:

• Build software systems used by millions of low-income Americans, helping to put dollars back in their pockets
• Lead Propel in building machine learning infrastructure that all teams can take advantage of
• Continually improve how ad content is matched to users, how customer ad budget is spent, and how to distribute ad impressions
• Continually source new machine learning and recommender system innovations from industry, academia, etc
• Create software that is reliable, testable, scalable, and maintainable
• Effectively communicate with team members during projects, code review, etc.
• Contribute to building our eng culture and processes as we continue to scale
• Collaborate on deciding on the right projects, building great solutions, and helping your team succeed

What you have:

• Deep experience designing, building, shipping, and maintaining complex full-stack software
• Experience with a startup environment or the ability to operate effectively when faced with ambiguity
• Deep knowledge and experience with machine learning algorithms and libraries
• Deep experience with building and improving recommender systems
• Strong communication skills across technical and non-technical audiences and topics
• Eagerness to learn new techniques, strong prioritization skills, the ability to quickly run an experiment with newly implemented models, and the ability to scale up use of that model to a large production environment
• Fluency in Python or a willingness to learn and specialize in this language
• Passion for making a difference in the lives of our users
• Nice to have: Experience with or knowledge of government services, particularly safety net services like SNAP, WIC, TANF, SSI, SSDI, Medicaid, Section 8
• Nice to have: Experience working on advertising platforms

We are strongly committed to hiring a diverse and multicultural team, and encourage applications from traditionally under-represented backgrounds, including those with direct experience with the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.