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Salary: USD 207,000 - 244,000 / annual
Checkr is a data platform powering safe and fair decisions through AI verification. The company serves over 140,000 customers including Uber, Airbnb, Doordash, and Anthropic, processing millions of background checks annually. 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 production AI systems that power core products. The ML team develops systems for document processing, charge classification, entity resolution, and in-product intelligence—production services 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. The team values shipping over process, results over paperwork, and engineering craft. You'll work with LLMs and APIs as first-class tools, distinguishing between working code and AI slop.
Key responsibilities include:
- Building and deploying ML/AI services that Product Engineering teams rely on, writing model code, API layers, monitoring, and tests
- Designing with 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
- Shipping production software with clean, well-structured code, solid OOP, proper abstractions, error handling, and tests
- Partnering with product and engineering teams to translate business problems into ML solutions and define API contracts
- Building evaluation frameworks, running experiments, and making data-driven decisions about model and system performance
- Shipping AI-powered workflows, automating pipelines, building agentic workflows, and contributing to Checkr's agentic platform
You will work 3+ days per week from office (Denver or San Francisco hub locations). The company offers in-office perks including lunch five times weekly, commuter stipend, and relocation assistance.
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 in production
- Strong Python fluency with clean, testable, well-structured code and solid OOP instincts
- Hands-on experience using LLM APIs in production systems: prompt engineering, structured outputs, function calling, cost management, and evaluation
- Experience building and maintaining APIs, working with CI/CD pipelines, and shipping code 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
- Ability to use AI tools (Copilot, Claude, etc.) to move faster while understanding every line produced and spotting AI slop
- A-player mindset with strong bias for action: raises the bar, moves with urgency, stays resilient through ambiguity, takes 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
