Backend Engineer, Core Machine Learning @

Join a leading fintech company that’s democratizing finance for all.

Robinhood was founded on a simple idea: that our financial markets should be accessible to all. With customers at the heart of our decisions, Robinhood is lowering barriers, removing fees, and providing greater access to financial information. Together, we are building products and services that help create a financial system everyone can participate in.

Just as we focus on our customers, we also strive to create an inclusive environment where our employees can thrive and do impactful work. We are proud of the world class products and company culture we continue to build and have been recognized as:

• A Great Place to Work
• A CNBC Disruptor 50 in 2019 and 2020
• A LinkedIn Top Startup in 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2020

Robinhood is backed by leading investors that include DST Global, Index Ventures, NEA, Ribbit Capital, Thrive Capital, and Sequoia.

Check out life at Robinhood on The Muse!

About the role

Insights from data power most decisions at Robinhood. The Core Machine Learning team works with a simple mission of making it easy to use machine learning at Robinhood. The team is executing the mission by building the core infrastructure (eg. training and serving platform, feature platform) and a number of model-as-a-service solutions (eg. embedding service, multi-arm bandit service). The team works closely with data scientists who are applying ML in various spaces such as risk and fraud, growth, customer understanding etc. to ensure that they are able to ship their solutions to create business value.

As a backend engineer for the ML platform team, you will support and strengthen the software foundation of Robinhood’s ML platform. As the platform shapes up and gets released in stages, you will work towards making it highly scalable, reliable, and observable for our customers. You will have the opportunity to optimize the performance of the services and the feature pipelines that expose ML models to various business applications. You will also be responsible for integrating internal or 3rd party add-ons to the ML platform from time to time. You will play a critical role to build a robust MLOps infrastructure to support the thriving community of ML engineers and data scientists. You will regularly collaborate with the machine learning engineers in the platform team and the engineers in various infrastructure, data engineering, and security teams to ensure that Robinhood’s ML platform complies with the engineering standards and the “safety first” value of the firm.

What you’ll do day to day:

• Build and expand the foundational software layer of Robinhood's in-house ML platform for model and feature serving
• Review and restructure the ML platform - as needed - to make it more stable, secure, observable, and scalable
• Integrate the hive/spark backend to the ML and data science development infra (Jupyterhub or alike) to create a seamless data access experience for the data scientists
• Collaborate with various platform, data science, and data engineering teams to build a robust and secure data access layer for the ML platform
• Onboard 3rd party ML and DS libraries and platforms if needed, integrating them with the in-house ML infra
• Champion best software development practices in the team
• Provide continuous support to a growing community of ML engineers and data scientists at Robinhood

About you:

• 2+ years of software engineering experience in the industry
• Solid understanding of relational databases and transactions
• Experience of developing distributed and highly concurrent systems
• Experience of developing and supporting data and/or compute-intensive systems
• Good intuition for REST API design
• Familiarity with Machine learning systems

Bonus points:

• Industry experience of building or supporting AL/ML/data science platforms for large user base
• Experience of contributing to open source ML platform repos

Technologies we use:

• Python/Django, Go as the main languages and frameworks of choice.
• PostgreSQL as our primary data store.
• Redis and Memcached as our caching layer.

Feeling ready to give 100% to democratizing finance for all? We’d love to have you apply, even if you feel unsure about whether you meet every single requirement in this posting. At Robinhood, we’re looking for people invigorated by our mission, not just those who simply check off all the boxes.