Upstart is looking to build foundational infrastructure that democratizes access to generative AI for every product and engineering team across the company, aiming to bring the power of ML, particularly LLMs and generative AI, to life in Upstart's core products.
Requirements
- 6+ years of software engineering experience, with 2+ years working directly on ML-driven products or intelligent systems
- Strong backend development skills (e.g., Python with FastAPI or Flask), plus experience with cloud-native tooling (e.g., Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform)
- Experience integrating LLMs or ML models into production systems, including APIs and user-facing applications
- Ability to think rigorously about system design, latency tradeoffs, and user impact when working with ML features
- Experience shipping GenAI or LLM-powered features using frameworks like LangChain, LlamaIndex, or OpenAI APIs
- Familiarity with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), vector search (e.g., FAISS, Pinecone), and real-time inference patterns
- Strong intuition for prompt engineering, model testing, and evaluation methodologies
Responsibilities
- Design and build user-facing ML features that harness LLMs and generative AI to unlock new product capabilities
- Partner with product, design, and ML research to prototype and deliver high-impact, ML-powered experiences
- Own the technical architecture and implementation strategy for applied ML systems - balancing latency, observability, and iteration speed
- Build scalable services and APIs that bring model outputs to users in trustworthy and intuitive ways
- Collaborate across platform, infra, and legal/compliance teams to ensure ML deployments meet standards for safety, fairness, and performance
- Establish and evangelize best practices for prompt design, model evaluation, and experimentation across the org
Other
- Proven ability to lead complex initiatives across engineering, product, and research stakeholders
- Excellent communication skills and a collaborative, product-minded approach
- This team operates on the East/West Coast time zones.
- This team has regular on-site collaboration sessions. These occur 3-4 days per Quarter at one of our offices.
- If you require reasonable accommodation in completing an application, interviewing, completing any pre-employment testing, or otherwise participating in the employee selection process, please email candidate_accommodations@upstart.com
