Machine Learning Engineer

Gradient Sports spun out of Pro Football Focus (PFF) in May 2024. We’re taking the same dedication to industry-leading player grades, analysis, and metrics and applying them to the Beautiful Game of football (soccer).

We build intuitive, efficient, and delightful products for professional clubs, agencies, media, and fans. Our models and data pipelines power experiences relied upon by paying customers across the global football ecosystem, and we’re only getting started.

As Gradient’s Machine Learning Engineer, you will own the systems that take our data science models from prototype to production. Our customers rely on the accuracy, reliability, and timeliness of these models, and you will ensure they run consistently and scale as the business grows.

You will focus specifically on model deployment, monitoring, reliability, and lifecycle management. While our Data Engineer owns core data pipelines and ingestion, you will own everything that happens after the data is ready: from transforming data into model‑ready features, to packaging and deploying models, to ensuring performance, versioning, and observability in production.

Working closely with data scientists, engineers, and product stakeholders, you will design and maintain the infrastructure that turns our data into stable, customer‑facing model outputs. This role blends hands‑on engineering with architectural ownership: you’ll build systems that work today while anticipating the demands of a global, data‑rich product tomorrow.

• Productionize data science prototypes into stable, maintainable, and monitored ML workflows.
• Own and evolve our Snowflake data architecture and dbt transformation layers to ensure consistent, high‑quality pipeline outputs.
• Build CI/CD processes that support reliable model deployments.
• Implement monitoring and observability for model performance, data drift, data quality, and pipeline reliability.
• Create automated frameworks for testing, validation, and documentation across datasets and models.
• Partner with data scientists to translate research code into production-ready components.
• Collaborate with engineering teams on APIs, batch scoring, and real‑time or near–real‑time data services.
• Support incident response, triage, and root‑cause analysis for production issues.

• Technical
  
  Experience:
  
  ~5 years of experience in ML Engineering, MLOps, or Data Engineering roles, ideally in production environments with paying customers.
• Snowflake + dbt Expertise:
  Proven experience building, maintaining, and optimizing data models, transformations, and pipelines in Snowflake and dbt.
• Production Mindset:
  Deep understanding of how to deploy, monitor, and maintain ML systems in production, including CI/CD pipelines, orchestration tools, and observability practices.
• Strong Python Engineering:
  Ability to write clean, maintainable, well‑tested Python code suitable for production environments.
• Hands‑On Builder:
  Comfortable with 0 to 1 environments, creating structure where none exists, and managing multiple meaningful projects without losing sight of quality.
• Data Quality & Reliability Focus:
  Experience building robust data validation, testing, and monitoring pipelines.
• Communication &
  
  Collaboration:
  
  Strong ability to partner with data scientists, engineers, and product stakeholders to deliver reliable, high‑impact systems.
• Timezone Alignment:
  Based within GMT+1 ± 2 hours to ensure effective collaboration with the core team.

• Experience working with broadcast tracking data, or similar large time‑series datasets.
• Passion for football, sports analytics, and competition.
• Experience scaling systems in a high-growth startup environment.

Gradient is redefining how football is understood and experienced. Our analytics and models sit at the center of that vision, and as our first ML Engineer, you will directly shape how our products scale with our ambition.

This is an opportunity to architect and own foundational systems at a fast‑moving, global early‑stage company, and to build the infrastructure that ensures Gradient remains the most trusted source of physical and tactical football metrics in the world.

Your work will have an immediate, visible impact on the clubs, agencies, broadcasters, and partners who rely on our insights every day.

Gradient Sports is proud to be an Equal Employment Opportunity employer.

We do not discriminate based on race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, veteran status, disability status, or other applicable legally protected characteristics.