Staff Machine Learning (ML) Engineer

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 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 summarizing conversations 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, working closely with your Product partners 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 bets such as our recent GPT-based integration with suggested replies. You could also build tools to evaluate and visualize model quality so our customers can zero in on giving the best buying experience.

Drift AI Tech Stack These are not hard requirements

• Java
• Python
• AWS
• 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 group of people with different expertise
• Can stitch together many different services and processes together even if you have not worked with them before
• Uphold quality standards in engineering, security, and design

What you'll be doing on the team:

Day 1 you will

• Use your onboarding time to learn how things work here and to practice writing and shipping software that makes our customers successful
• Start to dig in and get the basics down about our customers
• Learn Drift-specific systems, product information, and review paperwork (we have to get that out of the way).
• Have lunch with your manager and maybe your team

By the end of week 1 you will

• Get to know your customer - Every team at Drift owns a different area of the product and our Customers are a super important ingredient to how we build products!
• Have received a first look into Drift engineering systems, culture and product process through various conversations;
• How Product Works at Drift
• Engineering Path of Success/ Path of Failure
• Auth & Debugging at Drift
• Customer-centered Engineering
• Have transitioned from onboarding to your new team
• Have your local dev environment set up and you will have completed your First-day ship!!!

By the end of month 1 you'll

• Meet all of your members from Design to Product and Customer Advocate!
• Work with your manager to identify the "small rocks" (aka Team Goals) for your first month along with any other goals.
• Also work with your manager to develop your list of personal/ professional goals.
• Ramp up by engaging in these product processes at Drift;
• Take ownership of a "small rock" from a 1-pager
• Contribute to story time
• Participate in a green-lit kickoff
• Write code toward your "small rock"
• #Shipyard a completed product
• Measure your impact!

Drift is committed to being an equal opportunity employer.

We know that applying for a new job can be intimidating. But guess what? At Drift, there is no such thing as an "ideal candidate." We believe in the power of teamwork - and in the desire to learn something new every day. We believe in hiring people, not just skills. Take it from our CEO.

If this sounds like a company you would like to join and a role you would thrive in, please don't hold back from applying! Whatever skills you bring to the table or background you're coming from, we welcome you to start a conversation with us. We need your unique perspective for our continued innovation and success. We're looking forward to learning more about you!

Drift is committed to providing reasonable accommodations for candidates with disabilities in our recruiting process. If you need any assistance or accommodations due to a disability, please let us know at disabilities@drift.com