← All roles

Manager, Machine Learning Engineering

Tala· Technology – Data & Platform
Apply on company site
Remote$170k - $210kFull-timePosted 4w ago

About the role

Lead Tala’s ML Platform team as a player-coach, directing a group of Machine Learning Engineers to build platforms, frameworks, and infrastructure for secure training, deployment, monitoring, and operation of ML models at scale, with a focus on real-time inference and streaming data systems.

Responsibilities

  • Lead & Grow the Team - Manage and develop a team of 4–6 Machine Learning Engineers across mid-to-senior levels.
  • Hire, source, interview, and close strong MLE talent.
  • Establish clear expectations, provide regular feedback, and create development plans for direct reports.
  • Coach engineers toward growth and promotion while addressing performance gaps directly and thoughtfully.
  • Create opportunities for engineers to take on challenging projects and grow their technical leadership.
  • Own Engineering Delivery - Set quarterly goals and ensure the team consistently delivers against them.
  • Own prioritization across product roadmap work, run-the-business activities, and operational excellence.
  • Balance team capacity across new development, maintenance, technical debt, and production support.
  • Improve team productivity by reducing context switching and delegating effectively.
  • Partner with engineers and technical leads to estimate and scope complex work.
  • Provide Technical Leadership - Guide development of platforms and frameworks for data exploration, feature development, training, testing, deployment, and monitoring of ML models.
  • Drive engineering practices around testing, automation, observability, fault tolerance, IaC, and deployment.
  • Own and improve SLOs, on-call health, capacity planning, reliability, and incident response.
  • Review technical designs and drive architectural standards and debt reduction.
  • Partner Across the Organization - Collaborate with Data Science, Data Engineering, Data Platform, Product, Credit, and Business Development teams.
  • Translate business and technical needs into scalable ML platform solutions.
  • Coordinate dependencies and delivery across multiple engineering and data teams.
  • Create structure and clarity in evolving priorities and requirements.

Qualifications

  • 2+ years of directly managing engineers, including hiring, performance management, coaching, and career development.
  • Experience managing a team through at least one full performance cycle.
  • Demonstrated ability to coach engineers toward promotion and address underperformance.
  • Experience owning team goals, prioritization, estimation, and delivery.
  • Experience with production on-call, incident response, and capacity planning.
  • Willingness to be actively involved in sourcing, interviewing, and closing engineering talent.
  • 6+ years of backend software engineering experience in consumer-scale applications.
  • At least 3 years of hands-on Python experience.
  • Experience building and operating machine learning or causal inference systems in production.
  • Earlier-career experience personally building and deploying ML models or ML infrastructure.
  • Ability to participate in technical architecture and system-design discussions and provide technical direction without needing to be the primary coder.
  • Strong understanding of software quality, security, reliability, testing, and production operations.

Skills

Required:Team leadership and coachingTechnical strategy & deliveryMachine Learning Platform

Benefits

  • Remote-first with offices in Santa Monica, CA; Nairobi, Kenya; Mexico City, Mexico; Manila, Philippines; Bangalore, India.
Last updated Oct 21, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.

About Tala

Digital Financial Services, Credit, Savings and More

A money app for the majority. Tala bridges digital and cash ecosystems to help customers seamlessly manage their financial lives, all in one app.

Financial ServicesCreditSavingsMobile App
Company profileWebsite

More open roles at Tala