Affinity stitches together billions of data points from massive datasets to create a powerful, accurate representation of the world's professional relationship graph. Based on this data, we offer our users the insights and visibility they need to nurture and tap into the opportunities in their team's network.

This role is part of the AI Insights team, which owns the services that power Affinity's leading relationship intelligence, which is achieved through information retrieval from billions of unstructured and structured data. As a Senior Machine Learning Engineer, you will collaborate with data engineers, software engineers, and product managers to shape the future of private capital's leading CRM platform. This involves designing and building AI systems that efficiently uncover insights from compelling business interaction data, a unique opportunity within the industry.

This is an applied machine learning position with a strong emphasis on engineering, not research. You will be driving the development of our ML Ops and ML Engineering capabilities.

What you’ll be doing:

• Take projects from ideation to production, including: feature engineering, model selection, deployment, and model observability and evaluation.
• Gather product requirements and translate them into ML system design requirements.
• Work on a variety of information extraction, information storage and information retrieval problems from both structured and unstructured data.
• Architect efficient and scalable systems that support serving inference services.
• Develop reusable AI-based services, including ML models, foundation models, and agents, for other backend services at Affinity to consume.
• Lead complex technical efforts and provide technical input for peers, such as system design review, code review and best practices.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams (product, infra, data engineering, software engineering) and ML engineering teams to build robust, high-scale systems that underlie all of our data processing and ML Operations.

Qualifications

Don’t meet every single requirement? Studies have shown that women and people of color are less likely to apply to jobs unless they meet every qualification. At Affinity, we are dedicated to building a diverse, inclusive, and authentic workplace, so if you’re excited about this role, but your past experience doesn’t perfectly align with the qualifications above, we encourage you to apply anyways. You may be just the right candidate for this or other roles.

Required:

• 5+ years of experience in software engineering and/or Machine Learning experience in applying machine learning in production, with a focus on ML Engineering and ML Ops.
• Experienced in the following technical areas:

• Architecture design for distributed systems
• Building maintainable and testable codebases and services
• Developing ML systems, such as recommendation systems and information retrieval
• Relational DB, non-relational DB and vectorDB
• Developing AI applications powered by LLM and/or agents.
• Proficient in building services in Python and common ML frameworks, such as PyTorch and Scikit-learn.

• Experience with observability tools for both online and offline evaluation and tracing for AI applications.
• Deep experience with large datasets, and are comfortable with tools for high-scale data ingestion, transformation, analysis, and prediction.
• Experience collaborating closely with engineering, product, data, and other cross-functional teams.

Nice to Have:

• Experience with developing machine learning applications at scale from inception to user impact.
• Familiar with serving machine learning models for streaming and batching inference at scale.
• Experience with packaging, CI/CD and pipeline automation.
• Good understanding of machine learning systems’ testing, benchmarking and online monitoring.
• Experience with dataset engineering, such as data curation, augmentation and synthesis, to assist ML model improvement.

Tech stack: Our ML pipeline manages multiple Python services that support various AI features, including utilizing OCR to extract information from unstructured data, serving embedding models to vectorize chunks, and ranking a list of recommendations based on relevance and user preference. We maintain the Docker images and deployment pipeline via CircleCI. Our data stack includes Spark, Python, Kafka, and Databricks.

How we work:

Our culture is a key part of how we operate, as well as our hiring process:

• We iterate quickly. As such, you must be comfortable embracing ambiguity, be able to cut through it, and deliver value to our customers.

• We are candid, transparent, and speak our minds while simultaneously caring personally with each person we interact with.

• We make data-driven decisions and make the best decision for the moment based on the information available.

What you'll enjoy at Affinity:

• We live our values: As owners, we take pride in everything we do. We embrace a growth mindset, engage in respectful candor, act as playmakers, and "taste the soup" by diving deep into experiences to create the best outcomes for our colleagues and clients.
• Health Benefits: We cover both you and your dependents' extended health benefit premiums and offer flexible personal & sick days to support your well-being.
• Retirement Planning: We offer an RRSP plan to help you plan for your future.
• Learning & Development: We provide an annual education budget and a comprehensive L&D program.
• Wellness Support: We reimburse monthly for things like home internet, meals, and wellness memberships/equipment to support your overall health and happiness.
• Team Connection: Virtual team-building activities and socials to keep our team connected, because building strong relationships is key to success.

Please note that the role compensation details below reflect the base salary only and do not include any equity or benefits. This represents the salary range that Affinity believes, in good faith, at the time of this posting, that it will pay for the posted job.

A reasonable estimate of the current range is $113,000 to $187,000 CAD. Within the range, individual pay depends on various factors including geographical location and review of experience, knowledge, skills, abilities of the applicant.

About Affinity

With more than 3,000 customers worldwide and backed by some of Silicon Valley's best firms, Affinity has raised $120M to empower dealmakers to find, manage, and close more deals. How? Our Relationship Intelligence platform uses the wealth of data exhaust from trillions of interactions between Investment Bankers, Venture Capitalists, Consultants, and other strategic dealmakers to deliver automated relationship insights that drive over 450,000 deals every month. We are are proud to have received Inc. and Fortune Best Workplaces awards as well as to be Great Places to Work certified for the last 5 years running. Join us on our mission to make it possible for anyone to cultivate and fully harness their network to succeed.

We use E-Verify

Our company uses E-Verify to confirm the employment eligibility of all newly hired employees. To learn more about E-Verify, including your rights and responsibilities, please visit www.dhs.gov/E-Verify.