Staff Machine Learning Platform Engineer - Alt

Alt is unlocking the value of alternative assets, starting with the $5B trading-card market. We let collectors buy, sell, vault, and finance their cards in one place and we are backed by leaders at Stripe, Coinbase, Seven Seven Six, and pro athletes like Tom Brady and Giannis Antetokounmpo. Our next frontier is real-time pricing at scale—the Alt Value that powers every trade, loan, and product on the platform.

The Role

Are you a highly skilled ML engineer looking to own the lifeblood of a growing startup? In this role, you'll be responsible for architecting and scaling the machine learning platform that powers Alt’s core card pricing and underwriting engine. You will own the MLOps lifecycle, transforming our current systems into a high-performance, cost-efficient platform capable of sub-second inference and rapid retraining.

What you'll do here

• Re-architect ML pipelines and AWS infrastructure (EC2/ECS) to slash training times and cloud overhead

• Iterate on our underwriting model to maximize cash advance disbursements while maintaining target risk thresholds and default rates

• Standardize the MLOps stack, implementing robust CI/CD, model monitoring, and automated scaling for our bare-metal environment

• Engineer high-throughput data pipelines using Airflow and Python that can handle massive card-market datasets with minimal memory footprints

• Own the model's AWS infrastructure, writing code for our pricing API to ensure the model can serve at scale and with low latency

This is a perfect fit if you...

• Are passionate about trading cards or a similar alternative asset class, with a desire to go deep on the domain.

• Are a hands-on individual contributor who thrives in a zero-to-one startup environment.

• Want to own a business-critical system and have the opportunity to build a team around you.

• Are pragmatic and prefer to build a solution to a problem, not replace an entire system just for the sake of it.

• Are highly curious with a strong desire to learn.

What you bring to the table:

• 8+ years of software and/or data engineering experience with at least 4-5 years of direct machine learning platform experience.

• Expertise in High-Performance Python and Linux systems

• Deep experience with Docker/ECS and optimizing workloads on bare-metal EC2 instances

• A strong foundation in ML Ops and infrastructure, with experience deploying models on AWS using tools like ECS and Docker.

• Experience in data orchestration using Airflow for model training and batch jobs.

• Proven track record of scaling ML systems in production, specifically solving for memory bottlenecks and compute-heavy training cycles

• Experience with ML platforms that support pricing and/or underwriting models in a similar marketplace environment (nice to have)

What You’ll Get From Us:

• A seat at the table to help shape the future of Alt and the alternative asset space

• Autonomy and ownership on projects that matter

• $100/month work-from-home stipend

• $200/month wellness stipend

• WeWork office stipend

• 401(k) retirement benefits

• Flexible vacation policy

• Generous paid parental leave

• Competitive healthcare benefits, including HSA, for you and your dependent(s)

Base salary range: $240,000 - 270,000, plus equity. Offers may vary based on experience, location, and other factors.