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Salary: USD 207,000 - 244,000 / annual
Checkr is building a data platform to power safe and fair decisions. The company processes millions of background checks annually for major customers including Uber, Airbnb, DoorDash, and Anthropic. Checkr is recognized on the Forbes Cloud 100 2025 list and is a Y Combinator 2024 Breakthrough Company.
You will join the ML team within Checkr's Data & ML organization, building and shipping AI systems that power the company's core products. The ML team develops production services for document processing, charge classification, entity resolution, and in-product intelligence that Product Engineering teams depend on daily.
This is a production engineering role, not research. You will own ML services end-to-end: design, code, deploy, and monitor them. You'll work with LLMs and APIs as first-class tools, building AI-native software with a focus on engineering craft and shipping results over process.
Key responsibilities:
- Build and deploy ML/AI services: design, develop, and ship models and AI systems that other teams rely on, including the model code, API layer, monitoring, and tests
- Design with LLMs and APIs: use LLM APIs (OpenAI, Anthropic, etc.) as production building blocks, making decisions about when to call an LLM, fine-tune, use classical models, or write rules, while optimizing for cost, latency, and quality
- Ship production software: write clean, well-structured code with solid OOP, proper abstractions, error handling, and tests that pass code review; use CI/CD as your standard workflow
- Partner with product and engineering: translate business problems into ML solutions, define API contracts with product engineers, and communicate clearly with non-ML partners
- Evaluate and iterate fast: build evaluation frameworks, run experiments, make data-driven decisions, and ship incrementally rather than waiting for perfection
- Ship AI-powered workflows: automate pipelines, build agentic workflows, and contribute reusable skills and context to Checkr's agentic platform
Checkr operates from hub locations in Denver, San Francisco, Nashville, and Santiago. The role expects in-office work 3+ days per week, with in-office perks including lunch five times weekly, commuter stipend, and snacks/beverages.
REQUIREMENTS:
- Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Mathematics, or related technical field, or equivalent depth from experience
- 6+ years building software professionally, with at least 2 years building ML systems that run in production
- Strong Python fluency; write clean, testable, well-structured code with solid OOP instincts
- Hands-on experience using LLM APIs in production systems: prompt engineering, structured outputs, function calling, cost management, and evaluation
- Built and maintained APIs, worked with CI/CD pipelines, and shipped code that other engineers depend on
- Comfort with and enthusiasm for AI-assisted workflows; experience using LLMs, code-generation tools, or agentic systems in production or operational contexts
- Use AI tools (Copilot, Claude, etc.) to move faster while understanding every line they produce; ability to spot and avoid AI slop
- A-player mindset with strong bias for action: raise the bar, move with urgency, stay resilient through ambiguity, take ownership
NICE TO HAVE:
- Experience with MLOps platforms (MLflow, SageMaker, Vertex, or similar)
- Background in document processing, OCR, or information extraction
- Experience with PySpark or large-scale data processing
- Ruby experience (Checkr's platform runs on Rails)
- Familiarity with compliance-sensitive domains (fintech, legal tech, HR tech)
- Working knowledge of dbt, Snowflake, or modern ELT/data transformation tools
