Sr. Manager, Software Engineering - Machine Learning Simulations

The Team: 

Upstart's Machine Learning and Simulations Platform team builds and operates the infrastructure behind ML model training, features engineering, inference, and marketplace simulation. Our simulation platform answers one question before any change reaches a borrower: what would this new ML model, price, or fee have produced for real applicants? It replays historical data through production pricing logic in isolated environments, and it is now the shared tool every machine learning team at Upstart uses to size the impact of a launch. Our priorities are reliability teams can bet a launch on, fidelity to production we can prove, cost per simulation stays in check as usage grows, and coverage that extends across the lending funnel and into new loan products.

As the Senior Engineering Manager, Machine Learning Simulations at Upstart, you will lead the team that owns this platform. Today machine learning teams run roughly a thousand simulations a month on it. Your job is to make it production-grade, cut its cost while usage doubles, and open it to Analytics and Finance teams who need the same answers about pricing and portfolio strategy. You will work across machine learning, pricing, product, analytics, and infrastructure teams, many of whom own the logic your platform has to reproduce faithfully.

How you’ll make an impact

• Own the engineering roadmap for Upstart's marketplace simulation platform, and decide which teams and use cases it serves next
• Lead, coach, and grow a team of engineers working across distributed services, offline data pipelines, and large-scale compute
• Raise simulation reliability and accuracy to a level teams trust for launch decisions, including automated checks that detect drift between simulated and production results
• Reduce the cost of each simulation as usage grows, through smart architecture and compute choices
• Extend simulation coverage across the lending funnel and into new loan products, partnering with the teams who own each stage of pricing and decisioning logic
• Turn recurring questions from machine learning, analytics, and capital markets partners into self-serve simulation workflows

Minimum Qualifications 

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience
• 8+ years of software engineering experience, including 3+ years of engineering management experience
• Experience leading engineering teams that build and operate backend platforms or distributed systems in production
• Experience delivering platform or infrastructure programs that span multiple teams
• Proficiency with some or many of the following: Python, Kotlin, AWS, Kubernetes, Databricks, Spark

Preferred Qualifications

• Knowledge of simulation, backtesting, experimentation, or offline model evaluation systems
• Experience supporting machine learning teams or operating MLOps infrastructure, including model inference, workflow orchestration, and offline feature pipelines
• Knowledge of lending, pricing, credit risk, or marketplace economics
• Ability to treat compute cost and efficiency as an engineering goal alongside reliability
• Ability to build shared platforms where partner teams own part of the logic, and to keep those interfaces steady as systems evolve
• Experience developing senior engineers and emerging engineering leaders

Position location This role is available in the following locations: Remote 

Time zone requirements The team operates on the East/West coast time zones.

Travel requirements As a digital first company, the majority of your work can be accomplished remotely. The majority of our employees can live and work anywhere in the U.S but are encouraged to to still spend high quality time in-person collaborating via regular onsites. The in-person sessions’ cadence varies depending on the team and role; most teams meet once or twice per quarter for 2-4 consecutive days at a time.

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