Hiring: Staff Machine Learning Engineer Company: AppFolio Location: San Diego, CA Job Posted Time: 2026-09-16 15:20:10 Employment Type: Full-time / Hybrid Target Skills & Keywords : AWS, CI/CD, Data Pipeline, Deep Learning, Docker, ECS, Fine-tuning, LLM, LangChain, Machine Learning, Python, RAG, SageMaker, TensorRT, Triton, vLLM About the job Required Skills: •We're innovators, changemakers, and collaborators. We're more than just a software company — we're building the AI-native platform where the real estate industry comes to do business. We're transforming Property Management; how property managers operate, how residents live, and how intelligence flows across an entire industry. •This role works at the intersection of ML infrastructure, applied AI, and cost discipline. You'll partner closely with our Voice & Agents and Research ML engineers to harden their prototypes into production systems, and help move forward the platform layer that lets Realm-X scale across AppFolio's entire customer base. •ML Platform: Design and operate AppFolio's ML infrastructure on AWS — ECS, SageMaker, GPU fleets, model serving, autoscaling, and cost controls. •Drive AI Cost Discipline: Optimize cost across all AI applications — provider routing, caching, batch vs. real-time, model size selection, and inference economics. •Multi-Provider Reliability: Maintain reliable, multi-provider LLM access across Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic with sensible fallbacks and abstractions. •Training & Fine-Tuning Stack: Build the training and fine-tuning stack for Small Language Models, including data pipelines, GPU orchestration, and evaluation. •Productionize Research: Partner with Voice & Agents and Research ML engineers to harden their prototypes into production systems with SLOs, on-call rotations, and observability. •AI Safety & Guardrails: Operate AppFolio's AI safety and authorization layer — guardrails on AWS, scoped tool permissions, and human-in-the-loop gates for autonomous agent actions. Qualifications: •Systems thinker: You think in terms of platforms and long-term leverage, not just features. •Production builder: You've built and scaled ML infrastructure in production with meaningful business impact. •Ambiguity: You operate effectively in high ambiguity, turning unclear infra problems into clear direction. •Owner-operator: You take ownership with a founder/owner-operator mindset, act with urgency, and focus on outcomes. •Pace: You have a strong desire to move fast and deliver impact, while maintaining sound engineering judgment. •Collaboration: You are humble, collaborative, and low-ego, and you elevate those around you. •Sustainability: You value work-life balance as a foundation for sustained high performance. •Reliability mindset: You treat ML infra like any other production system — SLOs, on-call, observability, postmortems. •GPU performance tuning (vLLM, TensorRT, Triton, or similar). •Prior Staff-level role at a company with a significant AI infra footprint. Compensation: •$200,000 - $275,000 / year Interested candidates, please apply directly through the job posting on company's career page or try via AI auto apply on this platform. Don't miss this opportunity to join a forward-thinking team!