Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Patreon
Infrastructure
$212-318k
+ Equity
3+ days a week in office
Funding platform for creatives
Posted today
Funding platform for creatives
1001+ employees
Posted today
$212-318k
+ Equity
3+ days a week in office
1001+ employees
Company mission
To put creators in control of their work and their futures by strengthening the bond between them and their communities.
Role
Who you are
- You have deep experience building, deploying, and maintaining production-grade ML infrastructure at scale, specifically with low-latency live inference pipelines and feature store architectures
- You have a strong background in distributed systems and backend engineering, with the ability to write robust, maintainable code in Python
- You have a systematic approach to debugging complex, high-throughput systems and performance bottlenecks
- You are energized by building '0 to 1' infrastructure systems that stand the test of time and provide a reliable foundation for the team
- You possess strong communication skills and are effective at creating clear documentation for system architectures and infrastructure strategies
- You have a growth mindset, a keen eye for detail in code reviews, and a passion for empowering your teammates by improving developer velocity
- If you’re excited about a role but your past experience doesn’t match with every bullet point outlined above, we strongly encourage you to apply anyway. If you’re a creator at heart, are energized by our mission, and share our company values, we’d love to hear from you
What the job involves
- You'll join the Relevance team, whose mission is to build the ML systems that power how fans discover creators and how content surfaces across Patreon.
- The team is responsible for search, feed ranking, and creator-fan matching.
- You'll work closely with a small, collaborative group of MLEs on shared infrastructure, code reviews, and roadmap alignment, while partnering cross-functionally with Product, Data Engineering, and Trust & Safety to deliver measurable impact across the platform
- Architect, scale, and maintain high-throughput, low-latency live inference infrastructure to support our relevance systems
- Own the end-to-end feature store lifecycle—from ingestion and transformation to production serving, ensuring high availability and consistency between online and offline features
- Design and implement observability, monitoring, and validation frameworks to detect performance gaps, latency spikes, and production drift
- Collaborate with cross-functional partners, such as product, data engineering, and trust and safety, to translate product requirements into robust, scalable infrastructure solutions
- Automate model deployment and reliability testing to improve developer velocity and ensure system stability
- Debug complex relevance systems when monitoring identifies performance bottlenecks or reliability issues
Our take
Creatives face two major struggles in the online space: getting eyes (or ears) on their work, and getting paid for it. Patreon was founded to solve both problems with a platform that would provide a space for creators to host and promote their work, and offer supporters a way to show their support through a regular paid subscription.
Patreon has been a leader in the content subscription space since its founding, but recently has come under pressure from newer rivals such as Substack and Ko-fi. It has maintained its position by shifting its focus from being primarily a marketplace for supporters to find creatives that interest them to being a toolbox for content creators to promote their work. While the site's creatives value this approach it remains to be seen whether Patreon will be able to return to the growth it was enjoying in previous years.
Despite the inroads made by competitors and a troubling global economic outlook making finances tougher for content creators and their supporters, Patreon is still a leader in its space, with over 250,000 active creators having made $3.5B through the platform.
Steph
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
Company
Funding (last 2 of 6 rounds)
Apr 2021
$155m
SERIES F
Sep 2020
$90m
SERIES E
Total funding: $352.1m
Company benefits
- Health Coverage: Medical, dental, and vision plans are available to our US employees and their dependents. Our plans have a nationwide network and we also cover a primary care concierge membership.
- Balance & Wellness: We offer a generous Flexible Time Off policy, in addition to days throughout the year where everyone takes the same day off to recharge our batteries. Employees and their dependents also have access to therapy, coaching, and Employee Assistance Programs services.
- Family Planning: We provide 20 weeks of paid parental leave, fertility, adoption, and surrogacy benefits, as well as an annual stipend for new additions to your families (including pets!).
- Lifestyle & Learning: You’ll have stipends to fund your personal lifestyle and to support your favorite creators on Patreon, as well as an annual stipend for learning and development.
- Hybrid Work: Our offices are in San Francisco, New York, and Porto. Plus, we have more teammates working remotely around the world.
- Financial Support: We offer employer matching for our retirement plans and Health Savings Account (HSA), as well as access to 1:1 financial guidance with a Certified Financial Planner.
Company HQ
SoMa, San Francisco, CA
Leadership
Jack Conte
(Co-Founder & CEO)Graduated from Stanford with a degree in Music. Created musical content on Youtube as Pomplamoose before founding Patreon.
Sam Yam
(Co-Founder, CTO & President)Worked in Analytics and Engineering roles at Yahoo, Ning and Loopt. Previously founded mobile advertising company AdWhirl, which was acquired by Google.
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