Sr. Staff Software Engineer/Engineering Manager

About Drift  

Drift®, the Conversation Cloud company, helps businesses connect with people at the right time, in the right place with the right conversation. Using the Drift Conversation Cloud, businesses can personalize experiences that lead to more quality pipeline, revenue and lifelong customers. Drift brings Conversational Marketing, Conversational Sales and Conversational Service into a single platform that integrates chat, email and video and powers personalized experiences with artificial intelligence (AI) at all stages of the customer journey. More than 5,000 customers use Drift to deliver a more enjoyable and more human buying experience that builds trust and accelerates revenue. Representing less than 1% of unicorns led by Latino founders, Drift is building an equitable, enduring company to transform the way businesses buy from businesses.

About Digital First

Drift is a Digital First company, which means Remote is the primary experience for all employees. For the majority of our positions, your location is flexible! If “Remote” is stated in the job location, that role can be located anywhere Drift is authorized to do business in the United States.

Select roles may require you to be located in a city where we have a Conversation Space (currently Boston, MA, San Francisco, CA, Tampa, FL, and London, UK – with more to come across the globe), or work hours associated with a specific time zone. If this is the case, it will be explicitly stated in the job description. Please work with your recruiter and hiring manager to learn more about where Drift is authorized in the U.S. and to determine if you are eligible for employment based on your location.

About the role

We are looking for an ML Engineer who is passionate and ready to tackle some of the most meaningful problems in the industry — from training AI models for bot-supported conversations, to designing next generation semantic search experiences, to recommendations for next actions across the buyer journey and across channels. Are you looking to have more impact and ownership in ML Engineering? 

As a Staff ML Engineer, you will drive the development of ML services, embedded with other Product teams  to build out solutions from conceptualization to production, setting goals and milestones, synthesizing customer stories into a development plan. You will be responsible for guiding architectural decisions, ensure excellent engineering quality and mentor engineers to do their best work!

You will be involved in creating infrastructure that classifies billions of messages a minute to extract buyer intent and sentiment for conversations, while also shipping disruptive solutions such as our recent Bionic Chatbots.

Drift AI Tech Stack These are not hard requirements

• Java
• Python 
• AWS & Sagemaker
• Docker/Kubernetes 
• DynamoDB 
• Elastic Search
• PyTorch, Huggingface, SpaCy, and Sklearn
• GPT and other LLMs
• Vector Databases
• CI/CD Pipelines
• Model Deployment and Serving

What we’re looking for

• Passion for scaling Machine Learning applications whether it be multimodal model serving and/or distributed preprocessing/training
• Being a technical expert on architectural decisions to help us scale!
• Engineers who enjoy driving best practices by facilitating code reviews and mentoring junior engineers
• Enthusiasm for owning projects from conceptualization to implementation
• Engineers with a sense of creating frameworks and products to enhance the work of others.

You may be a fit for this role if you:

• Have experience designing and building scalable infrastructure that enables deploying machine learning models at scale for real-time predictions
• Have a firm understanding of latency vs accuracy tradeoffs, and monitoring of server load, connection counts, host health and general app performance
• Have previous software engineering experience with distributed systems
• Can put yourself in the shoes of our customers to unite design & code and craft fantastic experiences
• Enjoy working on the backend to solve problems and delight customers
• You are a systems thinking and you have experience designing, building and maintaining REST APIs for use in production
• Have architected RESTful services and understand concepts such as batching, versioning, and idempotency
• You have experience in a server side programming language (Java//Python)
• Take pride in creating results quickly by breaking projects down. We execute on small pieces to generate visible results
• Enjoy working with a diverse