About this role
Kikoff builds a fintech suite of products that help millions of people build credit, access liquidity, and save money. Machine learning sits at the center of the business, driving credit underwriting models, risk systems that protect the balance sheet, and personalization frameworks for product growth.
This role exists to set the technical direction for machine learning and own the platform and modeling roadmap from end to end. The person in this position will architect evaluation pipelines, lead high-leverage projects like cash advance and credit underwriting models, and partner with Risk, Compliance, and Legal on model governance. Someone who thrives on extreme ownership, clear communication, and heavy hands-on execution will succeed here.
What you will do
- Define the multi-quarter technical vision and roadmap for machine learning across underwriting, fraud, risk, and personalization.
- Architect and evolve the core machine learning platform, including feature stores, model registries, and real-time and batch serving infrastructure.
- Personally lead the end-to-end lifecycle of flagship credit underwriting and cash advance models from problem framing to production launch.
- Partner with Risk, Compliance, and Legal to establish rigorous model governance, fair-lending analysis, explainability, and audit readiness.
- Establish standards for experimentation, measurement, guardrail metrics, and the correlation between offline evaluation and business outcomes.
- Act as the technical counterpart to product and business leaders to translate ambiguous goals into concrete technical bets.
- Raise the engineering bar across the organization through design reviews, code reviews, and hands-on mentorship of senior engineers.
What you need
- Have at least 8 years of software or machine learning engineering experience, with 5 or more years focused on building, deploying, and operating production ML systems.
- Demonstrate prior experience as a technical lead or the most senior machine learning engineer on a team with measurable business impact.
- Possess expert-level Python skills alongside strong general software engineering fundamentals and system design capabilities.
- Bring deep production experience with feature engineering, training, serving, monitoring, and designing ML platform components like feature stores.
- Demonstrate a strong command of gradient-boosted trees and classical machine learning for tabular data, along with working knowledge of deep learning frameworks.
- Have production experience with cloud infrastructure, containerization, and modern MLOps tooling.
- Hold a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, Statistics, or a related field.
Nice to have
- Experience in consumer lending, credit underwriting, fraud, or payments
- Production experience working alongside Ruby and Rails backends
- Experience working with Risk or Compliance partners on model approval processes in regulated environments
- Advanced degree in a related field
Skills and tech stack
Questions candidates ask
What is the salary range for this role?
The base salary range for this position is $336,000 to $392,000 USD.
Is this a management position?
This is a hands-on role with company-level impact rather than a management track position.
What kind of modeling work will I personally lead?
You will personally lead the most consequential modeling work, including cash advance and credit underwriting models.
What scale of company is Kikoff?
Kikoff is a profitable, pre-IPO fintech company with record revenue growth in 2025 and a unicorn valuation.