Machine Learning Engineer

About Tala
Tala is a global technology company building the world’s most accessible financial services. With more than $350 million raised from visionary investors, we are serving millions of customers around the world who have been overlooked by traditional financial institutions – and our plan is to serve millions more, and have been named by the Fortune Impact 20 list, CNBC’s Disruptor 50, and Forbes’ Fintech 50 list for five years running. We are expanding across product offerings, countries and crypto and are looking for people who have an entrepreneurial spirit and are passionate about the mission.
By creating a unique platform that enables lending and other financial services around the globe, people in emerging markets are able to start and expand small businesses, manage day-to-day needs, and pursue their financial goals with confidence. Currently, more than 7 million people across Kenya, the Philippines, Mexico, and India have used Tala products. Due to our global team, we have a remote-first approach, and also have offices in Santa Monica, CA (HQ); Nairobi, Kenya; Mexico City, Mexico; Manila, the Philippines; and Bangalore, India. 
Most Talazens join us because they connect with our mission of enabling financial agency for underbanked people around the world. If you are energized by the impact you can make at Tala, we’d love to hear from you!
The Machine Learning Engineer is a contributor who will build, monitor, and maintain Tala’s core machine learning and causal inference services and tooling. You will own customer-facing real-time streaming feature extraction and model inference, model-related batch compute platforms and jobs, service level objective definition and measurement, root cause analysis, software and architecture design, enterprise technical maturity assessment, highly effective cross-functional collaboration, and mentorship.

What You'll Do

• Develop Data Scientist and Analyst-friendly self-service tooling and frameworks to explore new data sources, extract new features, and train, test, deploy, and monitor models. 
• Optimize the model development and software development life cycles.
• Maximize quality of models, services, and tooling with unit testing, integration testing, dry run and blue-green deployment, infrastructure-as-code, automation, observability, and fault tolerance.
• Write and review design documents, perform code reviews, and weigh in on implementation choices from other technical teams. 
• Collaborate with and support cross-functional teams (Product, Data Platform, Credit, and Business Development).

What You'll Need

• 5+ years of backend software experience in consumer scale applications, at least 4 of them with Python
• 2+ of those years in real-time streaming data (Kafka, Kinesis, Beam, Flink, Spark Streaming)
• Experience autonomously building machine learning or causal inference models to solve business problems
• Advanced English skills

Our vision is to build a new financial ecosystem where everyone can participate on equal footing and access the tools they need to be financially healthy. We strongly believe that inclusion fosters innovation and we’re proud to have a diverse global team that represents a multitude of backgrounds, cultures, and experience. We hire talented people regardless of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, gender expression, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.