Senior Software Engineer, MLOps

📋 Job Overview

Forward Financing is a financial technology company based in Boston, Massachusetts with team members throughout the United States, Dominican Republic, and Canada. The company is on a mission to unlock the capital that fuels small businesses across America. Recognized as a Best Place to Work by Built In Boston and certified as a Great Place To Work®, Forward is investing in its employees, technology, and customer experience – with long-term success in mind every step of the way.

🏢 About Forward Financing

Our Engineering team serves as a key driver of innovation at Forward Financing. We build the software that powers a FinTech product that serves Small Businesses across the country. A key part of our strategy involves leveraging data from dozens of sources to power our AI/ML initiatives and our analytical capabilities. We're looking for an experienced Senior Software Engineer to join our team, responsible for the systems that power our online (real-time) feature store — the infrastructure that serves ML features to production models with low latency and high reliability.

🎯 The Role

In this role you will:

• 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

✅ Key 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

📌 Required Qualifications

• 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

⭐ Desirable 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

🎁 Benefits

Annual Salary: $175,000 - $220,000 USD
Annual Bonus: You have the potential to earn an additional 10% annual bonus.

🛂 Visa & Eligibility

At Forward Financing, we're committed to fair and transparent compensation. We believe in providing a compensation package that recognizes your skills, experience, and the unique value you bring to our team. We take a market-based approach to pay, regularly reviewing benchmark data to ensure our compensation remains competitive, equitable, and aligned with our performance-driven culture. Final offers are determined by a variety of factors, including the candidate's qualifications, relevant experience, specific skills, and internal equity. This approach ensures that our compensation is competitive and equitable. Your recruiter will provide specific details on the expected base and variable earnings as it pertains to this specific role.