Applied Machine Learning Engineer, LLM

About Upstart

Upstart is the leading AI lending marketplace partnering with banks and credit unions to expand access to affordable credit. By leveraging Upstart's AI marketplace, Upstart-powered banks and credit unions can have higher approval rates and lower loss rates across races, ages, and genders, while simultaneously delivering the exceptional digital-first lending experience their customers demand. More than 80% of borrowers are approved instantly, with zero documentation to upload.

Upstart is a digital-first company, which means that most Upstarters live and work anywhere in the United States. However, we also have offices in San Mateo, California;
Columbus, Ohio;
Austin, Texas; and New York City, NY (opening Summer 2026).

Most Upstarters join us because they connect with our mission of enabling access to effortless credit based on true risk. If you are energized by the impact you can make at Upstart, we’d love to hear from you!

Upstart’s new Applied LLM team is building foundational infrastructure that democratizes access to generative AI for every product and engineering team across the company. This is a cross-functional team at the intersection of machine learning, product, and engineering. Our mission is to bring the power of ML – particularly large language models (LLMs) and generative AI – to life in Upstart’s core products.

As a Staff Applied Machine Learning Engineer focused on building LLM applications, you'll work closely with researchers, product managers, platform engineers, and designers to ship intelligent features that elevate the user experience and expand the capabilities of our systems.

San Mateo, Columbus, Austin, Remote

This team operates on the East/West Coast time zones.

This team has regular on-site collaboration sessions. These occur 3-4 days per Quarter at one of our offices. If you need to travel to make these meetups, Upstart will cover all travel related expenses.

• Design and build user-facing ML features that harness LLMs and generative AI to unlock new product capabilities
• Partner with product, design, and ML research to prototype and deliver high-impact, ML-powered experiences
• Own the technical architecture and implementation strategy for applied ML systems – balancing latency, observability, and iteration speed
• Build scalable services and APIs that bring model outputs to users in trustworthy and intuitive ways
• Collaborate across platform, infra, and legal/compliance teams to ensure ML deployments meet standards for safety, fairness, and performance
• Establish and evangelize best practices for prompt design, model evaluation, and experimentation across the org

• 6+ years of software engineering experience, with 2+ years working directly on ML-driven products or intelligent systems
• Proven ability to lead complex initiatives across engineering, product, and research stakeholders
• Strong backend development skills (e.g., Python with FastAPI or Flask), plus experience with cloud-native tooling (e.g., Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform)
• Experience integrating LLMs or ML models into production systems, including APIs and user-facing applications
• Excellent communication skills and a collaborative, product-minded approach
• Ability to think rigorously about system design, latency tradeoffs, and user impact when working with ML features

• Experience shipping GenAI or LLM-powered features using frameworks like Lang Chain, Llama Index, or OpenAI APIs
• Familiarity with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), vector search (e.g., FAISS, Pinecone), and real-time inference patterns
• Proficiency in full-stack development, including front-end work with React or similar frameworks
• Strong intuition for prompt engineering, model testing, and evaluation methodologies
• Experience navigating complex requirements around explainability, user trust, or compliance in ML applications
• Track record of influencing architecture or product direction at a team or org level

• Competitive Compensation (base + bonus & equity)
• Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage with…