CURRENT ROOT EMPLOYEES - Please apply using the career page in Workday. This career site is for external applicants only.

As part of Root's interview process, we kindly ask that all candidates be on camera for virtual interviews. This helps us create a more personal and engaging experience for both you and our interviewers. Being on camera is a standard requirement for our process and part of how we assess fit and communication style, so we do require it to move forward with any applicant's candidacy. If you have any concerns, feel free to let us know once you are contacted. We’re happy to talk it through.

The Opportunity

Root is seeking a Lead Machine Learning Engineer II to serve as the expert in machine learning orchestration and deployment, while upskilling others throughout the team. This position will partner with Engineering and Data Science to identify and execute on opportunities for greater agility and automation in both research and production systems for our real-time bidding models for customer acquisition. This individual will be a thought leader, while also contributing hands-on to build and deliver our marketing strategy.

This position will embed within our data science organization, though will forge deep connective relationships with counterparts in platform engineering, information security, and cloud management. This role will have the opportunity to shape and scale Direct Marketing’s ML ops strategy, including but not limited to: R&D practices, delivery of models for real-time bidding, model monitoring strategies and implementation, as well as data ingestion and transformation.

Root is a “work where it works best” company. Meaning we will support you working in whatever location that works best for you across the US. We will continue to have our headquarters in Columbus and offices in other locations to give more flexibility and more choice about how we live and work.

Salary Range: $173,000 - $217,000 (Bonus and LTI eligible)

How You Will Make an Impact

• Own end-to-end machine learning systems (including feature engineering, model training, deployment, and monitoring) with focus on our marketing bid optimization platform

• Design and implement scalable ML pipelines and orchestrated data workflows that support versioning, lineage tracking, and accelerated research-to-production cycles

• Build comprehensive monitoring and alerting systems to track model performance, data quality, and infrastructure health in production environments

• Design and deliver the data science development experience, including patterns for provisioning compute, maintaining software environments, configuring a standard IDE workflow, and expanding our CI/CD integrations.

• Implement A/B testing frameworks and experimentation platforms for model validation and performance measurement

• Identify opportunities to improve efficiency, costs, and scalability in model research and deployment.

• Provide technical mentorship and training to data scientists on, e.g., MLOps practices, ML tooling, and cloud-based development

• Present data-driven recommendations to leadership for long-term investment in ML Ops.

• Evaluate, build, and integrate new tools to streamline ML development, deployment, and operations.

• Create and maintain technical documentation and knowledge sharing resources

What You Will Need to Succeed

• BS, MS, or PhD degree in Computer Science or related field.

• 6+ years of experience designing, building, and deploying ML model pipelines at scale in production environments (e.g., as a ML engineer)

• Expertise in cloud-based ML pipeline infrastructure (AWS, GCP, or Azure).

• Expertise in designing and deploying APIs to serve models to both internal and external endpoints.

• Deep expertise in Python, with experience in orchestration tools (e.g. airflow) and model and experiment tracking (e.g. mlflow)

• Experience with generating and utilizing CI/CD pipelines.

• Experience in building and delivering development experiences for yourself and others.

• Strong software engineering fundamentals.

• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills with the ability to drive strategic initiatives.

• Ownership mentality: takes the initiative to identify, champion, and execute on the highest impact work.

• Excellent communication and collaboration abilities to work with cross-functional teams.

• Strong understanding of working within regulated data environments, including defining process and technical controls to be both ISO and NIST compliant.

• Nice to have

  • Experience in R.

  • Experience translating modeling workflows from another language into python.

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 single qualification. At Root, Inc., we are dedicated to building a diverse and inclusive workplace, so if you’re excited about this role but your past experience doesn’t align perfectly with every qualification in the job description, we encourage you to apply anyway!

Join us

At Root, we judge people based on the merit of their work, not who they are. If you are passionate about what this role entails and solving real problems, we encourage you to apply. We want to learn about you and what you can add to our team.

Who we are

We’re harnessing the power of technology to revolutionize insurance. Using machine learning and mobile telematic platforms, we’ve built one of the most innovative FinTech companies in the world. And we’re just getting started.

What draws people to Root

Our success is in large part due to our unwavering standards in hiring. We recognize that our products are only as good as the people building and promoting them. We want individuals who find solutions by going through the cycle of ideation to implementation with curiosity, rigor, and an analytical lens. Ask anyone who works here and you’ll hear similar reasons for why they joined:

Autonomy—for assertive self-starters, the opportunities to contribute are limitless.

Impact—by challenging the way it’s always been done, we solve problems that have a big impact on our business.

Collaboration—we encourage rich discussion and civil debate at every turn.

People—we are inspired by the collection of crazy-smart people around us.