Staff Machine Learning Engineer II

CURRENT ROOT EMPLOYEES - Please apply using the career page in Workday. This career site is for external applicants only.

The Opportunity

Root is seeking a Staff Machine Learning Engineer to serve as the expert in machine learning orchestration and deployment, while upskilling others throughout the org. This position will partner with teams across the organization to identify and execute on opportunities for greater agility and automation in both research and production systems. This individual will be a central thought leader, while also contributing hands-on within areas most pivotal to company strategy.

This position will embed within our data science organization, though will forge deep connective relationships with counterparts in platform engineering, information security, and cloud management. Over a multi-year timeframe, this role will have the opportunity to shape and scale Root’s formalized ML ops strategy.

Root is a “work where it works best” company. Meaning we will support you working in whatever location that works best for you across the US. We will continue to have our headquarters in Columbus and offices in other locations to give more flexibility and more choice about how we live and work.

Salary Range: $200,000 - $250,000 (Bonus and LTI eligible)

How You Will Make an Impact

• Serve as the foremost expert in the machine learning lifetime, inclusive of ML pipelines and model deployment.

• Promote best practices and provide training in ML Ops, automation, and infrastructure management.

• Analyze and optimize critical ML systems in applications such as marketing, risk segmentation, and lifetime value analytics.

• Identify opportunities to improve efficiency, costs, and scalability in model research and deployment.

• Design and build feature stores to increase the velocity of research and deploy cycles.

• Build comprehensive and responsive operational tools to monitor both model fitness and infrastructure status.

• Support enablement for data scientists, e.g., assisting to provision resources

• Provision and customize virtual machines to enhance data science capabilities.

• Present data driven recommendations to leadership for long-term investment in ML Ops.

• Evaluate, build, and integrate new tools to streamline ML development, deployment, and operations.

What You Will Need to Succeed

• BS, MS, or PhD degree in Computer Science or related field.

• 8+ years of experience designing, building, and deploying ML model pipelines at scale in production environments (e.g., as a ML engineer)

• Strong ownership mentality.

• Expertise in cloud-based ML pipeline infrastructure (AWS, GCP, or Azure).

• Expertise in designing and deploying APIs to serve models to both internal and external endpoints.

• Experience with managed ML services (e.g., Databricks, Outerbounds).

• Deep expertise in Python and R, with experience in orchestration tools (e.g. airflow) and model and experiment tracking (e.g. mlflow)

• Strong software engineering fundamentals.

• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills with the ability to drive strategic initiatives.

• Excellent communication and collaboration abilities to work with cross-functional teams.

• Experience with infrastructure automation tools like Terraform.

• Strong understanding of working within regulated data environments, including defining process and technical controls to be both ISO and NIST compliant.

As part of Root's interview process, we kindly ask that all candidates be on camera for virtual interviews. This helps us create a more personal and engaging experience for both you and our interviewers. Being on camera is a standard requirement for our process and part of how we assess fit and communication style, so we do require it to move forward with any applicant's candidacy. If you have any concerns, feel free to let us know once you are contacted. We’re happy to talk it through.

Don’t meet every single requirement?

Studies have shown that women and people of color are less likely to apply to jobs unless they meet every single qualification. At Root, Inc., we are dedicated to building a diverse and inclusive workplace, so if you’re excited about this role but your past experience doesn’t align perfectly with every qualification in the job description, we encourage you to apply anyway!

Join us

At Root, we judge people based on the merit of their work, not who they are. If you are passionate about what this role entails and solving real problems, we encourage you to apply. We want to learn about you and what you can add to our team.

Who we are

We’re harnessing the power of technology to revolutionize insurance. Using machine learning and mobile telematic platforms, we’ve built one of the most innovative FinTech companies in the world. And we’re just getting started.

What draws people to Root

Our success is in large part due to our unwavering standards in hiring. We recognize that our products are only as good as the people building and promoting them. We want individuals who find solutions by going through the cycle of ideation to implementation with curiosity, rigor, and an analytical lens. Ask anyone who works here and you’ll hear similar reasons for why they joined:

Autonomy—for assertive self-starters, the opportunities to contribute are limitless.

Impact—by challenging the way it’s always been done, we solve problems that have a big impact on our business.

Collaboration—we encourage rich discussion and civil debate at every turn.

People—we are inspired by the collection of crazy-smart people around us.