Senior Software Engineer, Forecasting & Real-Time Optimization

Quick Facts

• Role: Senior Software Engineer (Forecasting & Real-Time Optimization)

• Focus: Production forecasting and real-time optimization systems for marketplace supply and demand

Description

You will lead the design and operation of production systems that turn streaming marketplace data into accurate, reliable forecasts. The work covers real-time feature pipelines, model training and inference infrastructure, backtesting and evaluation tooling, and a serving layer that downstream products query continuously. You’ll partner with scientists to productionize ML models and with downstream teams to define contracts and reliability guarantees.

Responsibilities

• Lead end-to-end projects: propose, design, break into milestones, align dependencies, and own estimates

• Architect ML systems: streaming feature pipelines, training/inference workflows, and signal serving with focus on latency, correctness, scalability, and cost

• Partner with science: productionize models and build rollout tooling (shadow, canary, rollback) plus backtesting/experimentation infrastructure

• Own signal contracts: define and maintain interfaces, data contracts, and SLAs between forecasting signals and downstream consumers

• Operate and ensure reliability: monitor latency/freshness/error rates and signal quality (accuracy, bias, drift), support peak events, participate in on-call, lead post-incident investigations

• Maintain code quality: write well-tested, maintainable code and improve teammates via code reviews and coaching

• Collaborate across functions: work with Product, Science, and partner engineering to balance accuracy, latency, and complexity

• Grow the team: mentor engineers, support hiring/onboarding, and share knowledge via design docs/runbooks/tech talks

Requirements

• 5+ years of software engineering industry experience building and operating backend or data systems in production

• BS/MS or equivalent in Computer Engineering, Computer Science, or related field (or relevant work experience)

• Experience designing and leading delivery of large-scale distributed systems, owning reliability via monitoring, on-call, and incident response

• Solid distributed systems fundamentals: fault tolerance, delivery semantics, and consistency tradeoffs

• Proven experience leading ambiguous, multi-engineer projects and mentoring engineers

• Strong written communication with design docs that align stakeholders

Benefits

• Medical, dental, and vision insurance plus additional programs

• Mental health benefits

• Family building benefits

• Child care and pet benefits

• 401(k) plan with company match

• Paid time off: 12 observed holidays + discretionary PTO for salaried roles (hourly roles have 15 days)

• 18 weeks of paid parental leave

• Subsidized commuter benefits

• Monthly Lyft credits and complimentary Lyft Pink membership