Senior Software Engineer, Forecasting & Real-Time Optimization

Quick Facts

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

• Focus: Production forecasting systems for real-time marketplace decisioning

Description

You will build and operate production systems that convert streaming marketplace data into accurate, reliable forecasts for rider demand and driver supply. The role covers real-time feature pipelines, training/inference infrastructure, backtesting and evaluation tooling, and a serving layer used by downstream products. You’ll partner with scientists and product/engineering teams to ship models from prototype to production with strong reliability and low-latency performance.

Responsibilities

• Lead end-to-end projects: drive technical design, milestone planning, dependency alignment, and estimates

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

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

• Own signal contracts: define/maintain interfaces, data contracts, and SLAs for downstream consumers

• Operate systems: monitor health (latency/freshness/error rates) and signal quality (accuracy/bias/drift), participate in on-call, and lead post-incident follow-ups

• Ensure code quality: write well-tested maintainable code and conduct improving code reviews; coach testing and engineering practices

• Collaborate broadly: align with Product and Science on tradeoffs among 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 experience building and operating production backend or data systems

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

• Experience leading large-scale distributed systems with reliability ownership (monitoring, on-call, incident response)

• Solid fundamentals in distributed systems (fault tolerance, delivery semantics, consistency tradeoffs)

• Ability to lead ambiguous multi-engineer projects and mentor others

• Strong written communication with design docs

Benefits

• Medical/dental/vision insurance and 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 plus discretionary PTO (salaried) or 15 days PTO (hourly)

• 18 weeks of paid parental leave

• Subsidized commuter benefits

• Monthly Lyft credits and complimentary Lyft Pink membership

• Hybrid work: in-office 3 days per week (Mon/Wed/Thu) with flexibility up to 4 weeks/year remote