Applied ML Engineer

What we look for

• 2 to 6 years shipping ML systems to production, with the pipeline scars to prove it
• Excellent data engineering: Python, SQL, dbt or Spark or the equivalent, pipelines that survive schema drift and malformed real-world exports, comfort owning infrastructure end to end
• Strong applied ML on tabular and structured data. You know when gradient boosting beats a neural network and you reach for the boring model that wins
• Rigor about labels and leakage. You have caught a model that looked great in offline eval and was learning the wrong thing, and you can tell us exactly how
• Bias for production over polish: you would rather have a live model improving weekly than a perfect one in a notebook
• Evidence we can inspect: systems you built, data platforms you owned, open source, a writeup of a hard pipeline problem you solved
• Excited to get close to the domain: reading estimates, sitting with adjusters, learning why a water mitigation claim prices the way it does

Nice to have

• Structured extraction from documents, photos or call transcripts
• Insurance, pricing, risk or marketplace data
• LLM engineering for extraction and agent tool use

How we work

We work almost six days a week, in person in New York, and go-live weeks take the seventh day too. We say this plainly because intensity is our structural advantage against incumbents with a hundred times our headcount, and because the engineers we want read this section and relax. This is the environment where nobody tells you to slow down.

Compensation

Competitive salary for your market plus founding-level equity, weighted toward equity because the value of this role compounds with the data asset you build.

How to apply

No cover letter. Send three things to me:

1. The best data pipeline or ML system you have shipped, with code or a writeup we can inspect
2. A first-principles answer, under 60 seconds as a loom/Vimeo video, to: you have five years of claims history where every label is the approved value after negotiation between contractor and carrier. What goes wrong if you train on it directly, and what would you do instead?
3. Which city you would work from and your soonest start date

We respond to every real application within 48 hours. An exceptional answer to question 2 gets an interview regardless of resume.

A meeting lands on your calendar

If they’re a yes, I book the chat. You show up — that’s the whole job-hunt.