Staff Software Engineer

About This Role

Join Lookout as a Staff Software Engineer specializing in Machine Learning/AI. We are seeking talented engineers to build core components and services within our cloud-native backend system, which supports massive data volumes and millions of users.

Your Responsibilities:

• Own the full ML lifecycle: Drive projects from initial research and design through production deployment, monitoring, and continuous retraining.
• Establish robust frameworks: Implement systems to train, evaluate, stress-test, and monitor ML/AI models, preventing drift and ensuring efficiency under production constraints.
• Mentor & Lead: Set technical direction as a Senior Individual Contributor (IC) while mentoring junior engineers.
• Ensure Quality: Improve automated testing suites (unit, integration, functional) to uphold our high standards of quality and reliability.
• Service Ownership: Fully participate in end-to-end service ownership, including on-call duties for critical components powering Lookout applications.

What We Are Looking For

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science (or related field) with 5-8+ years of experience.
• A proven track record of architecting and deploying high-impact ML/AI systems that translate complex models into robust, real-world solutions.
• Expert proficiency in Python and strong software engineering skills for writing reliable, production-grade code.
• In-depth experience with major frameworks: PyTorch, TensorFlow, scikit-learn.
• Familiarity with modern stacks like Hugging Face and LangChain.
• Mastery of standard ML algorithms (classification, clustering, regression) and deep learning models.
• Hands-on experience with the LLM/RAG stack, including embeddings, knowledge graphs, vector databases, retrieval strategies, and prompt engineering.
• Ability to optimize model efficacy using statistical methods and manage production ML infrastructure (feature stores, MLOps pipelines).

Bonus Points

• Experience with advanced techniques like model distillation, quantization, and efficient LLM fine-tuning (LoRA/PEFT)
• Familiarity with coding agents (Cursor, Copilot, Claude Code).
• Knowledge of event streaming frameworks such as Kafka.
• Experience with Scala or Golang.