About the Role

We're looking for a Staff ML Engineer to join our Cloud ML team - the team that owns both the cloud-side ML infrastructure and the applied ML research that powers SimpliSafe's intelligent home security products. This is a senior individual contributor role focused on raising the bar for how we build, deploy, and operate ML systems at scale.

You'll partner closely with other Staff and Principal engineers to drive architecture, mentor across the team, and set the technical direction for our ML platform. The work spans two of our most demanding workloads: real-time computer vision inference that processes video from cameras and doorbells across our customer base, and LLM/GenAI infrastructure that will power our future generation of intelligent applications.

This role is for someone who has built ML infrastructure before, knows where the sharp edges are, and is energized by making other teams faster and more reliable.
What You'll Do

Set technical direction for ML infrastructure

• Drive architecture decisions for our Kubernetes-based ML platform - anchored on Ray for inference, alongside KServe, Triton, and vLLM - across real-time and batch workloads.
• Lead deep technical reviews on system design, capacity planning, and reliability for the highest-stakes ML systems at SimpliSafe.
• Identify and remove the systemic bottlenecks in our ML deployment infrastructure - whether that's serving reliability, deployment friction, observability gaps, scaling, or cost.

Build and operate real-time CV inference at scale

• Own the design and evolution of cloud-side inference systems that process live video and events from SimpliSafe devices in real time.
• Drive throughput, latency, and cost improvements (batching strategies, GPU utilization, autoscaling, multi-model serving) for production CV models.
• Build the feedback loops between cloud inference, edge devices, and the data flywheel that improves model quality over time.

Stand up LLM/GenAI serving infrastructure

• Help shape how SimpliSafe serves LLMs in production - model serving patterns, KV-cache and batching strategies, evaluation pipelines, guardrails, and cost controls.
• Partner with applied ML engineers to take new GenAI-powered product features from prototype to scaled deployment.

Raise the engineering bar across Cloud ML

• Mentor engineers across the team through design reviews, code reviews, pairing, and written guidance - a meaningful uplift on everyone you work with.
• Establish and evangelize best practices for model lifecycle management (registry, deployment, monitoring, rollback, drift) and on-call.
• Write the documentation, runbooks, and architectural decision records that make the platform legible and durable.

Own reliability and operational excellence

• Lead incident response and postmortems for critical ML systems; turn lessons learned into platform-level improvements.
• Define SLOs, observability standards, and on-call practices for ML services in production.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of software/ML engineering experience, with a clear track record of building and operating production ML systems at scale.
• Deep expertise in cloud ML infrastructure on Kubernetes, with hands-on production experience with Ray (which powers our inference stack); experience with KServe, Triton, vLLM, Kubeflow, Argo, or similar is a strong plus.
• Strong production experience on AWS (EKS, S3, IAM, networking) and with Kafka, containerized deployments, CI/CD, and infrastructure-as-code.
• Demonstrated experience designing and operating high-throughput, low-latency inference systems - GPU-aware scheduling, batching, autoscaling, multi-tenancy.
• Solid grounding in ML fundamentals: how models are trained, evaluated, versioned, deployed, monitored, and rolled back in production.
• Proficiency in Python is required; experience with a systems language (Go, C++, Rust) for performance-sensitive components is a plus.
• Staff-level technical leadership: ability to drive ambiguous, cross-cutting initiatives, align senior stakeholders, and elevate the engineers around you without formal authority.
• Strong written and verbal communication - you can make complex technical tradeoffs legible to ML scientists, product, and other infra teams.

Bonus Points

• Hands-on experience with LLM serving in production (vLLM, TGI, TensorRT-LLM, SGLang) - KV cache management, continuous batching, speculative decoding, quantization for serving.
• Experience building real-time video or streaming ML pipelines (Kafka, Kinesis, Flink, or similar) at scale.
• Background supporting CV workloads in production - model formats, GPU/accelerator tradeoffs, video codecs.
• Experience with model lifecycle tooling (MLflow, Weights & Biases, model registries, drift detection, shadow deployments).
• Open source contributions to the ML infrastructure ecosystem (Ray, KServe, Triton, vLLM, Kubeflow, etc.).
• Experience operating in environments with strong security and compliance requirements.

Why This Role

The Cloud ML team owns the full surface area - infrastructure and applied research - which means your work as a Staff infra engineer directly shapes what's possible for the science. You'll have unusual leverage: the platform you build determines how fast SimpliSafe can ship intelligent features, and the features we ship directly impact whether someone's home is safer tonight than it was yesterday.
What Values You'll Share

• Customer Obsessed - Building deep empathy for our customers, putting them at the core of our work, and developing strong, long-term relationships with them.
• Aim High - Always challenging ourselves and others to raise the bar.
• No Ego - Maintaining a "no job too small" attitude, and an open, inclusive and humble style.
• One Team - Taking a highly collaborative approach to achieving success.
• Lift As We Climb - Investing in developing others and helping others around us succeed.
• Lean & Nimble - Working with agility and efficiency to experiment in an often ambiguous environment.

What We Offer

• A mission- and values-driven culture and a safe, inclusive environment where you can build, grow and thrive
• A comprehensive total rewards package that supports your wellness and provides security for SimpliSafers and their families (For more information on our total rewards please click here)
• Free SimpliSafe system and professional monitoring for your home.
• Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) that bring people together, give opportunities to network, mentor and develop, and advocate for change.

The target annual base pay range for this role is $183,500 to $244,600.

This target annual base pay range represents our good-faith estimate of what we expect to pay for this role. We use a market-based compensation approach to set our target annual base pay ranges and make adjustments annually. We carefully tailor individual compensation packages, including base pay, taking into consideration employees' job-related skills, experience, qualifications, work location, and other relevant business factors.

Beyond base pay, we offer a Total Rewards package that may include participation in our annual bonus program, equity, and other forms of compensation, in addition to a full range of medical, retirement, and lifestyle benefits. More details can be found here.

We're committed to fair and equitable pay practices, as well as pay transparency. We regularly review our programs to ensure they remain competitive and aligned with our values.