Staff Software Engineer

Liftoff is the leading growth acceleration platform for the mobile industry, helping advertisers, publishers, game developers and DSPs scale revenue growth with solutions to market and monetize mobile apps.

Liftoff’s solutions, including Accelerate, Direct, Influence, Monetize, Intelligence, and Vungle Exchange, support over 6,600 mobile businesses across 74 countries in sectors such as gaming, social, finance, ecommerce, and entertainment. Founded in 2012 and headquartered in Redwood City, CA, Liftoff has a diverse, global presence.

About the Team:

The ML Reliability team at Liftoff is dedicated to building and maintaining tools that ensure the robustness, observability, and performance of machine learning systems at scale. As part of a cross-functional engineering org, the team focuses on enabling high-quality ML operations by providing observability into data and model pipelines, enforcing safeguards against misconfigurations, and defining best practices for integrating new features, models, and data sources. This role plays a key part in advancing that mission, helping shape the reliability platform that supports Liftoff’s ML-driven products and ensures consistent and dependable outcomes in production.

AS A BACKEND ENGINEER ON THE ML PLATFORM TEAM, YOU WILL:

• Lead the design and evolution of large-scale ML infrastructure, driving improvements in availability, reliability, and operational excellence for our production ML systems.
• Define and implement end-to-end monitoring, alerting, and performance tracking for ML models and data pipelines, ensuring model health and data integrity at scale.
• Partner with data scientists and platform teams to standardize and scale model deployment, versioning, and A/B experimentation frameworks.
• Lead and participate in incident response efforts, conducting root cause analysis and implementing corrective actions to prevent recurrence.
• Identify systemic inefficiencies and opportunities for automation or simplification, and drive cross-functional efforts to improve system performance and developer productivity.
• Drive adoption of best practices in software and ML engineering, including code quality, risk-driven testing, and explainable, maintainable systems.
• Act as a mentor and multiplier, helping other engineers level up in ML systems, reliability, and architectural thinking..
• Contribute to strategic planning and partner with product and platform leads to align engineering efforts with business outcomes.

DESIRED QUALITIES AND EXPERIENCES:

• BS in Computer Science with 8+ years of professional experience; or
• MS in Computer Science with 6+ years of professional experience; or
• PhD with 3+ years of professional experience; software engineering, or reliability engineering, with a focus on production systems.
• Proven ability to drive large technical initiatives and lead projects spanning multiple teams.
• Solid core CS fundamentals (data structures, algorithms, architecting systems).
• Deep expertise in Python and/or Go; fluency with ML libraries (e.g., TensorFlow, PyTorch), cloud infrastructure (e.g., AWS)
• Experience with ML monitoring tools (e.g. Prometheus, Grafana).
• Experience in big data engines such as Trino and Spark is a big plus.
• Excitement to work on cutting-edge ML infrastructure at massive scale—and to make it simple, reliable, and elegant.
• Strong problem-solving skills and the ability to work collaboratively across teams.
• Ability to lead across team and role boundaries to effect large scale change in culture and systems.
• A healthy sense of fun!

NICE TO HAVE:

• Experience in ML systems for training Transformer models, CTR prediction models.
• Prior experience in AdTech, mobile growth, or performance marketing domains.
• Contributions to open-source ML infrastructure or tools.

Location:
This role is eligible for full-time remote work in one of our entities: CA, CO, ID, IL, FL, GA, MA, MI, MN, MO, NJ, NV, NY, OR, PA, TX, UT, WA, and Canada.

We are a remote-first company with US hubs in Redwood City, Los Angeles, and New York City.

Travel Expectations:
We offer several opportunities for in-person team gatherings, including but not limited to project meetings, regional meetups, and company-wide events. We expect our employees to attend these gatherings at least once per quarter. These gatherings provide essential opportunities for collaboration, communication, and team building.

Compensation:
Liftoff offers all employees a full compensation package that includes equity and health/vision/dental benefits associated with your country of residence. Base compensation will vary based on the candidate's location and experience.

The following are our base salary ranges for this role: 

• Canada: CAD 150,000 - 185,000

#LI-JH1

Liftoff is committed to providing and maintaining a work environment where all employees and candidates are treated with dignity and respect and that is free of bias, prejudice, and harassment. Liftoff is further committed to providing an equal employment opportunity for all employees and candidates for employment free from discrimination and harassment on the basis of sex, gender (including sexual harassment, gender harassment, and harassment due to pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding, and related conditions), sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, gender nonconformity, race, creed, religion, color, national origin, ancestry (including association, affiliation, or participation with persons or activities related to national origin, English-proficiency or accent, or immigration status), physical or mental disability, medical condition(s), genetic information of an individual or family member of the individual, marital or domestic partner status, age, veteran or military status, family care status, requesting or taking pregnancy, parental or disability leave, requesting an accommodation, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state, or local law, regulation, or ordinance. All such discrimination and harassment is unlawful and will not be tolerated. Liftoff maintains a continued commitment to equal employment opportunity and expects the full cooperation of all personnel.

Liftoff's Compensation Strategy

Liftoff's compensation strategy includes competitive market rate along with equity and benefits and perks that will give our employees what they need to do their best work. In order to ensure teams are compensated fairly for the work performed, we map out specific levels and take into consideration the cost of labor within each location. Liftoff provides employees a total compensation package of competitive market salaries, equity, health and wellness stipends, medical benefits associated with your country of residence. The base compensation will vary based on location, experience as well as level.

Agency and Third Party Recruiter Notice:

Liftoff does not accept unsolicited resumes from individual recruiters or third-party recruiting agencies in response to job postings. No fee will be paid to third parties who submit unsolicited candidates directly to our hiring managers or Recruiting Team. All candidates must be submitted via our Applicant Tracking System by approved Liftoff vendors who have been expressly requested to make a submission by our Recruiting Team for a specific job opening. No placement fees will be paid to any firm unless such a request has been made by the Liftoff Recruiting Team and such a candidate was submitted to the Liftoff Recruiting Team via our Applicant Tracking System.