Senior Software Engineer, MLOps

Forward Financing is a financial technology company on a mission to unlock the capital that fuels small businesses across America. The company is seeking an experienced Senior Software Engineer to design, build, and operate the online feature store and related infrastructure that serves machine learning features to production models. The role also involves developing data pipelines, optimizing Postgres schemas, improving system reliability and observability, and collaborating with data, product, and application teams.

Responsibilities:

• Design, build, and operate the online feature store — the real-time serving layer that delivers ML features to production models with low latency and strong consistency guarantees
• Build and maintain data pipelines (batch and streaming) that compute, validate, and publish features from source systems into the online and offline stores
• Work on the data models and Postgres schemas that back real-time feature serving, optimizing for query performance, freshness, and scale
• Act as a technical leader for feature store infrastructure; help drive enhancements to quality, scalability, reliability, and observability for the systems ML models depend on
• Partner closely with our Data Science, Analytics Engineering, Product Management, and Application Development teams to translate business requirements into production-grade engineering solutions
• Contribute to mentoring for junior engineers
• Contributing to best practices and raising the bar through thoughtful code reviews and contributions to technical design discussions

Requirements:

• 5+ years of software experience, with a focus on backend systems (Python required) and 2-3 years of MLOps experience
• Strong experience with relational databases (Postgres preferred) — schema design, query optimization, and operating databases under production load
• Experience building and operating real time inference systems
• Understanding of the unique reliability and correctness demands of ML-serving infrastructure (data freshness, training/serving skew, feature consistency)
• Experience in mutli-service architectures and design patterns
• Experience in Agile software development
• Typically has a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Data Engineering, or a related field, or additional relevant experience
• Experience with feature stores (e.g., Feast, Tecton, SageMaker Feature Store) or building an equivalent system in-house
• Experience with MLOps tooling (e.g., MLflow, Airflow, dbt) and ML model deployment/serving patterns
• Experience designing and implementing complex systems across multiple software applications and/or languages
• Excellent written and verbal communication
• Ability to influence others
• Demonstrated project management skills