Senior ML Engineer

About the RoleWe're hiring a Senior ML Engineer to be the data team's owner of production ML and AI agent systems. You'll take models from prototype to production, build and maintain the low-latency ML API that powers our Next Best Action (NBA) engine, and partner with our HAL team to ship LLM agents that turn NBA recommendations into real conversations with credit union members and partners. This is a builder's role at a builder's moment: NBA is going live, the agent infrastructure is being shaped now, and you'll define how Clutch does production AI for years to come.

About the TeamThe Data team today is five people: one data scientist, two data engineers, one data analyst, and one product manager. We're small, ambitious, and shipping fast — two ML models heading to production, an ML API being built, and two AI agents (one customer-facing, one partner-facing) in active development. You'll be the senior technical voice for ML and AI engineering inside the team, and the bridge to HAL, the platform team that builds Clutch's agent runtime. Expect tight feedback loops, real autonomy, and a team that values pragmatism over purity.

What You’ll Do

Within 3 months, you will:Take ownership of the ML API that serves NBA recommendations, partnering with the data engineer who's been building it, and harden it for low-latency production traffic

Ship your first agent tool contract end-to-end: schema design, handler implementation, structured-error contract, unit tests, deployed via HAL's runtime

Set up the eval foundation for our agents: golden transcripts, rubric-based judges, regression suites that run on every prompt or model change

Build a working relationship with HAL and become the data team's go-to on agent infrastructure decisions

Within 6 months, you will:Be the primary owner (with data engineer support) of the ML API and the agent tool layer that wraps NBA and our ML models

Have shipped at least one production-grade agent (customer-facing or partner-facing) with prompt versioning, evals, observability, and multi-tenant gating in place

Define the data team's playbook for shipping a new ML model as an LLM-callable tool, end-to-end

Mentor the data engineers on ML/AI patterns so they can confidently support and extend the systems you own

Within 9 months, you will:Operate as the technical lead within the data team for NBA production AI at Clutch — the person other teams come to when they want to understand how NBA ships ML and agents responsibly

Have measurably improved agent cost and latency (target: 30%+ reduction on P95 latency or per-conversation cost on at least one agent)

Be shaping the data team's roadmap for the next generation of ML and AI products, in partnership with the PM and data scientist

Help us decide what to hire next as the team scales

What You’ll BringRequired

7+ years of engineering experience, with a proven track record of building and shipping production ML systems — you've taken models fr