Staff Software Engineer - Machine Learning

Change.org is searching for a Staff Software Engineer - Machine Learning to be part of the next revolution of Data & AI Engineering. Create groundbreaking technology for large-scale ML&AI Services, spoken language, and artificial intelligence.

We’re a social impact business (a public benefit company), and the world's largest social change platform with 100m monthly users, 50,000+ campaigns launched on the site every month, and a 100% user-generated revenue model. Our users win campaigns for change once every hour. 

• From mobilizing over 5 million people to investigate the fires in the Amazon, to mobilizing nearly 3 million against war and famine in Yemen, to large-scale mobilizations for the people of Iran and against the war in Ukraine, and calling for Racial Justice in the US, many movements were born on Change.org. Dozens of local, national, and international victories are happening every day thanks to the strength of our members who are changing the lives of people around the world. We want to help them go even further and we need your help! 
• You will report to our Senior Engineering Manager, Data & AI Enablement Team. As a key member of our Data & AI Enablement Team, you’ll use your machine learning research and development, ML engineering and operations,  and Data Management skills to build engaging user experiences, to develop our MLAI Services, and participate in the development, support, on-call and knowledge-share of our scaled Data & AI architecture. You will be working cross-functionally with designers, product managers, and other engineers. 

Key Outcomes:

• Product Delivery: Participate in all stages of product development: opportunity assessment, ideation, discovery, validation, solutioning and definition, building, measuring, scaling. Able to contribute to engineering and cross-functional partnerships by discussing tradeoffs, goals, and engineering-specific initiatives.
• Process: Lead feature development in an Agile environment, including adapting and improving (Scrum/Kanban iterative development, epic & ticket management, short release cycles, able to run retrospectives).
• Architecture & Technical Leadership: Champions as a Tech Leader. Proactive on security, bugs, performance while aligning & driving forward with technology advancements and reducing tech debt. Available to assist and unblock others in appropriate use of technology.
• Knowledge Share: Perform constructive code reviews to help the team maintain code quality and maintainability. Ability to demonstrate functionality of technology and technically mentor other engineers on usage and patterns.
• User Obsession: Have deep knowledge and advocacy for both internal and external user experience. Collaborate with PM, UX or relevant stakeholders to improve user experience.
• The Mission: Understands the connection between technology and mission. Acts as a material stakeholder and coalesces peers for the success of team & company.
• Communication: Ability to communicate advanced information and influence diverse stakeholders & audiences. Takes an active role in planning. Able to work through and resolve conflict and differences of opinion.
• Working Independently: Proactively communicates status, seeks help to unblock oneself, manages out to peers and up to leads and managers.

The Core Competencies for the role are:

• ML & AI: 
  • Serve as a ML & AI liaison to the rest of the product organization, both to help provide insight into existing priorities and to surface opportunities to build data science driven products.
  • Participate in the design of innovative A/B testing techniques to enhance discovery and personalization.
  • Involvement in research and potential implementation of natural language processing algorithms to aid in understanding and classification in our unique petition data
  • Make technical decisions and practice a high level of ownership in a data lake,  resilient service-oriented architecture with autoscaling.

• ML Operations:
  • Build and optimize a computational infrastructure that can simultaneously handle batch large scale analytics, real time streaming analytics and perform machine learning, training and prediction to serve hundreds of millions of users.
  • Be part of On Call schedules to support Production AI Services and data pipelines for smooth runs and support the business. 

• Data Management:
• Build the Data Management Framework for MLAI Models including (data collection, data augmentation, cleansing, data generation )
• Focus on data accuracy & optimization for MLAI Models via addressing data imbalance , data bias and improper data. 
• Develop and Manage  real time data pipelines , utilizing kafka connect, kafka streams and AWS Glue 

The most important skills and capabilities for the role are:

• Language and Framework Knowledge: Knowledge and usage for some of the open source languages and distributed computing frameworks (e.g. Kafka , Spark). Experience with Databricks AutoML, Notebooks, MLFlow, Delta Live tables and Unity Catalog. 
• Back-end: Skilled to expert level with Python and basic libraries for machine learning such as pandas , NumPy.
• ML Core: Expert knowledge with a focus on NLP processing, classification, time series analysis and clustering. Experience in Collaborative Filtering, Content Based Models using Embeddings for Recommendations and Deep Learning Models. 
• MLOps: Specialized in ML Model Operations and Lifecycle Management with Continuous Training (CT) and Continuous Monitoring(CM). Experience productionalizing ML models, model monitoring and MLOps
• Data Management: Deeper understanding of data mining, analysis, predictive modeling, statistics and advanced analytical techniques for larger dataset.Experience with PostgreSQL, Redshift and AWS an asset 
• Data Engineering: Knowledge and experience developing and managing Kafka-based data pipelines , utilizing kafka connect and streams 
• Infrastructure: Familiarity with technology used in the cloud: Terraform, Kubernetes, Docker, CI/CD, MLOps. 
• Security: Has a good understanding of encryption, authentication, and can identify potential risk. Understands broader security implications and can use tools to diagnose and suggest solutions.

Target experience:

• 8 + years in Python and basic libraries for machine learning such as pandas, NumPy.
• 6 + years in ML Core and framework knowledge
• 6 + years in MLOPs
• 7 + years in data management 

Interested? Great! Here's what you should know: This is a full-time role, and open to folks in the United States or Canada. 

We’re currently able to support employees based in the following US locations: AZ, CA, CT, FL, GA, IL, MD, MA, MO, NV, NJ, NY, NC, OR, PA, RI, TX, UT, VA, WA, DC, and WI. 

Change.org is a global company, and salaries are adjusted for cost of labor in each location. The annual salary of a Senior Staff Engineer is $219,000 in San Francisco, CA and is $201,000 CAD in Vancouver, Canada.

Benefits and perks also vary based on location. We typically offer a fully remote workforce, 100% employer-paid health plan options, life insurance, unlimited PTO, and 18 weeks of parental leave. 

We anticipate moving quickly and our evaluation process is as follows:

• Recruiter Screen
• Hiring Manager Interview
• Virtual Onsite / Technical Interview
• Final Interview w/ Leadership  

We know the confidence gap and imposter syndrome can get in the way of meeting amazing candidates like you, so please don’t hesitate to apply—we’d love to hear from you. We also know it’s rare for someone to meet 100% of the qualifications. Please apply anyway!

We’re working for a world where no one is powerless, and where creating change is a part of everyday life. We’re just getting started and hope you’ll join us!

We especially encourage applicants of different backgrounds, cultures, genders, experiences, abilities and perspectives to apply. We’re actively working to increase the diversity of experience and perspectives on our team and are looking for someone who can help continue to lead that process. 

Change.org is committed to being a diverse and inclusive workplace. Everyone says this, right? Well, we mean it—we invest in serious programs to bring in and support women and people of color, we have in-person onboarding experiences and affinity groups to help everyone feel included, we regularly celebrate the heritage of all staff, and we believe strongly in consistent, fair, and transparent salary scales to help level the playing field. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, national origin, or disability or veteran status.

We are legally required to conduct EEOC reporting. While this is required by the federal government, we recognize that it does not include all genders and ethnicities. We want you to know that Change.org celebrates all identities and we thank you for your participation.

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