Staff Machine Learning Engineer - Leasing

Salary: $200,000 - 250,000 per year Requirements:

• We want a systems thinker who approaches ML as a long-term platform capability rather than a short-term feature set.
• We need a proven production builder who has developed and scaled machine learning infrastructure with meaningful business impact.
• We look for someone with strong architectural leadership experience, including system design and technical decision-making.
• We require hands-on experience training or fine-tuning language models end to end, with solid understanding of deep learning, evaluation, and inference.
• We expect practical experience with LangChain, LangGraph, and modern retrieval-augmented generation patterns across structured and unstructured data.
• We need experience implementing AI guardrails, scoped tool access, and authorization layers for production AI systems, especially agentic solutions.
• We value comfort working through ambiguity and turning unclear infrastructure challenges into actionable direction.
• We want an owner-operator mindset with urgency, accountability, and strong outcome orientation.
• We seek a collaborative, low-ego partner who works effectively across ML, product, and engineering teams.
• We expect a reliability-first approach to ML systems, including SLOs, observability, on-call readiness, and postmortems.
• Experience with conversational AI, leasing, or CRM-adjacent workflows is a plus.
• GPU optimization experience with tools such as vLLM, TensorRT, or Triton is a plus.
• Familiarity with ontology-driven systems or knowledge graphs supporting AI applications is a plus.
• Knowledge of real estate, property management, or leasing workflows is a plus.
• Contributions to open-source ML infrastructure or LLM tooling are a plus.

• We will rely on you to define and execute the machine learning strategy for our leasing products, choosing the highest-leverage opportunities and aligning with product and engineering leadership.
• You will lead the ML direction for our autonomous leasing agent, shaping how it communicates with prospective tenants and improves leasing operations.
• You will own the model quality, evaluation framework, and continuous improvement loop that helps the Leasing Performer get better over time.
• You will partner with Voice & Agents and Research ML to assess new capabilities such as fine-tuning methods, retrieval strategies, and agentic patterns, and decide what is ready for production.
• You will build experimentation and evaluation infrastructure that allows our team to ship ML changes with confidence and measure outcomes that matter to customers.
• You will establish the standards, patterns, and practices for ML integration across Leasing Engineering, including prompt design, retrieval-augmented generation, fine-tuning, and model selection.
• You will own the production readiness of the ML systems supporting the Leasing Performer, including reliability, observability, cost discipline, and on-call expectations.

• AI
• CRM
• Fine-tuning
• Support
• LLM
• Machine Learning
• vLLM
• AI Agents
• Excel
• RAG

More:

We are AppFolio, the technology leader shaping the future of the real estate industry. We are building the AI-native platform where property management comes to do business, and our Realm-X platform powers this transformation through an autonomous leasing agent that supports the full leasing lifecycle. This is a staff-level role focused on our leasing AI systems, working closely with Leasing Engineering, Voice & Agents, and Research ML. We offer a comprehensive total rewards package, including a base salary range of $200,000 to $250,000, plus additional benefits and potential discretionary bonuses for eligible employees. We support hybrid work, coaching and mentorship, meaningful growth opportunities, and a culture built around impact, learning, and connection. Late-stage candidates complete an in-person meeting as part of our hiring process, and we are an equal opportunity employer committed to diversity and inclusion.

last updated 33 week of 2026