Staff ML Platform Engineer
Afresh is the leading AI company in fresh food—partnering with grocers like Albertsons, Wakefern, Meijer, and Stater Bros to order billions of dollars of fresh food in over 12,000 grocery departments nationwide.
Following record-breaking 70% growth in 2025, we’ve expanded our platform to cover all fresh departments, launched our full store suite, and debuted DC Fresh Buying.
We’re on a mission to eliminate food waste and make fresh food accessible to all. In 2025 alone our software helped save 200M lbs of food waste. If you're looking for a role where your work directly translates into massive scale and social good, and you want to be part of the team that defines the future of fresh, there is no better time to join us.
The ML Platform Engineering team at Afresh is responsible for building and maintaining the foundational infrastructure and tooling that powers all of our machine learning and applied science solutions. We provide the shared components and services that enable our teams to develop, deploy, and scale robust ML models. This includes a performant data API, configurable featurization, reliable forecasting systems, highly parallel optimization engines, and scalable training pipelines, and deep experimentation capabilities. As our product suite and customer base grow, so does the scale and complexity of what our platform needs to support, gracefully accommodating predictions and simulations across various time scales (hours, days, weeks), complex data hierarchies (pallets on a truck, shelves of mangos in a store, chunks of fruit in a bowl), and endless configuration possibilities (average shelf fullness, backroom loads, truck capacities).
About the Role
As an ML Platform Engineer on the ML Platform Engineering team, you will be instrumental in elevating our core ML platform to its next level of performance, reliability, and scalability. You'll work on the critical infrastructure that directly enables all of Afresh's Machine Learning and Applied Science teams to innovate faster and deliver impact. Your contributions will empower our product suite, including our flagship Prediction Engine, to power replenishment decisions on more than 15% of all produce sold in the United States.
What You'll Do:
- In your first 3 months, you might deliver a project that helps generalize model configuration, enables no-code model deploys for our various ML solutions, or vastly improves integration testing across our ML systems.
- By the end of your first 6 months, you will have owned the design and implementation of significant scalability improvements and additions to our ML platform. This might include new feature pipelines that power our recommendation engine, or work to stand up the first instance of real-time inference at Afresh.
Skills and Experience
- BS in Computer Science or a relevant technical field.
- 7+ years of professional software development experience with a proven track record of shipping high-quality applications and services.
- Experience working collaboratively with machine learning engineers, data scientists, or applied scientists on large-scale software projects involving machine learning models.
- Technical leadership experience and a demonstrated ability to mentor junior engineers.
- Deep expertise in library design, API design, data structures, and algorithms.
- Strong familiarity with Python.
Tech Stack: Our backend is pure Python (NumPy, Pandas, Torch, PySpark, Cython, orchestrated in Airflow). We use Databricks as our data warehouse. While we'd like you to have very good familiarity with Python, many of our problems are stack-agnostic.
This position is not eligible for company sponsorship.
Salary Band in USD:
Salary Band in CAD:
About Afresh
Founded in 2017, Afresh is working on the #1 solution to curb climate change: reducing food waste. By combining human insight and transformative technology, we're helping grocers provide fresher food to customers at more affordable prices.
Afresh sits at an incredible intersection of positive social impact, rocket ship financial growth, and cutting-edge technology. Our best-in-class AI research has been published in top journals including ICML, and we've raised over $148 million in funding from investors including former co-CEO of Whole Foods Market Walter Robb and Eric Schmidt's Innovation Endeavors.
Fresh is the past, present, and future of our food system – the waste we create today will impact our planet for years to come. Join us as we continue to build a vibrant, diverse, and inclusive team that embodies our company’s values of proactivity, kindness, candor, and humility.
Afresh provides equal employment opportunities (EEO) to all employees and applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, genetics, sexual orientation, gender identity/expression, marital status, pregnancy or related condition, or any other basis protected by law.
Here at Afresh, many of our employees work remotely provided that they reside in one of the following states: AL, AR, CA, CO, FL, GA, IL, KY, MA, MI, MT, MO, NV, NJ, NY, NC, OR, PA, TX, WA, UT, VA, WI.