Sr. Applied Machine Learning Engineer

📋 Job Overview

Plug is an automotive fintech startup building the marketplace for electric vehicles. We're looking for a Sr. Applied Machine Learning Engineer to join our Intelligence team and work alongside our ML engineer and data team, who built the models behind pricing and battery health. Together you'll take those models further: sharper price and volume forecasts, battery state-of-health models built from telematics, and LLM pipelines that pull structured data out of vehicle, title and inspection documents.

🏢 About Plug

Plug is an automotive fintech startup building the marketplace for electric vehicles. Consumers, dealers and commercial partners trade in, sell and auction used EVs on a platform built only for electric vehicles. Nothing in it is adapted from legacy automotive. We were founded in 2023 and are led by former Tesla executives. We are backed by a $20M Series A from Lightspeed Venture Partners.

🎯 The Role

Every car on Plug starts with a number: what is this EV worth today, and what will a dealer pay for it tomorrow? Those numbers come from our models. They draw on auction results, market data, vehicle telematics and battery health. As volume grows, our models have to get more accurate, update faster, and be easier to trust and explain.

✅ Key Responsibilities

• Build and ship agents and multi-agent workflows for operations, dealers, and sellers: document extraction, inspection and title review, dealer and seller communication, and internal tooling.
• Trace every agent so you can see each step, tool call, and decision. Use those traces to debug failures and turn them into new eval cases.
• Write evals before and alongside each agent: build datasets from real cases, measure accuracy and failure modes, and gate changes to prompts, models, and tools on the results.
• Make model and prompt decisions with data: compare options on accuracy, cost, and latency, and run upgrades when a model is deprecated or a cheaper one holds up.
• Integrate agents with the services the team already owns, through clean APIs and tools. Work within the existing architecture and raise design concerns with the owning engineer instead of routing around them.
• Ship full-stack when the job calls for it: the TypeScript and React screens where people review and correct agent output, and the backend endpoints behind them.
• Help the rest of engineering adopt the same patterns. Build reusable tools, examples, and short write-ups that make the next agent faster to build.

📌 Required Qualifications

• 5+ years of full-time industry software engineering, with a track record of shipping features to production and supporting them after launch.
• Hands-on experience shipping LLM features to production: tool use, retrieval, and structured output.
• Experience building evals and tracing for LLM systems: datasets drawn from real cases, automated scoring, and production traces you used to find and fix failures.
• Strong TypeScript or Python, and comfort working across the stack: APIs, databases, and frontend when needed.
• You work agent-first. You’ve built your own tooling around coding agents, such as skills, MCP servers, custom workflows, or evals.
• You enjoy being part of a small team: pairing, reviewing each other’s work, sharing credit, and building inside systems other people designed. You can disagree, make your case, and then ship the agreed plan.
• A habit of writing things down: short design notes, eval results, and runbooks that others can pick up.
• High agency in an ambiguous, fast-moving startup. You find the most valuable workflow to automate and ship against it without waiting for a perfect spec.
• BS in computer science, math, statistics, or a related quantitative field, or equivalent experience.

🎁 Benefits

• Annual salary: $164,000 – $200,000
• Health, vision and dental insurance
• 401(k) plan
• 30 days of work from anywhere per calendar year
• Daily lunch stipend
• Equity (based on role and performance)
• Unlimited PTO
• Fully stocked kitchen
• Dog-friendly office
• Ongoing opportunities for growth and development

🛂 Visa & Eligibility

Relocation assistance for candidates who need to move. Sponsorship is not available for this role.