Senior Software Engineer, Upstart
LLM Platform
$163.6-226.4k
+ Bonus & equity + Employee Stock Purchase Plan
More information about location
AI lending marketplace
Be an early applicant
AI lending marketplace
1001+ employees
Be an early applicant
$163.6-226.4k
+ Bonus & equity + Employee Stock Purchase Plan
More information about location
1001+ employees
Company mission
To enable effortless credit based on true risk.
Role
Who you are
- 6+ years of experience in object-oriented software engineering, with a strong systems engineering background
- Proficiency in backend development, microservices architecture, and infrastructure tools like Kubernetes, Docker, and Terraform
- Hands-on experience building ML platforms or infrastructure supporting LLMs or inference systems
- Familiarity with observability tools (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog) and data processing pipelines
- Strong written and verbal communication skills and a collaborative approach to cross-functional work
Desirable
- Full Stack development skills, ideally with Kotlin, Spring, JS/TS (React) or similar
- Experience with LLM toolchains such as LangChain, LlamaIndex, or OpenAI APIs
- Deep understanding of model inference optimization (e.g., quantization, ONNX, streaming)
- Exposure to retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), vector databases (e.g., FAISS, Pinecone), or prompt engineering
- Experience operationalizing LLMs in production, including latency management and prompt versioning
- Ability to influence platform direction and drive alignment across multiple engineering teams
- Awareness of LLM-specific risk domains, including hallucinations, fairness, and data privacy
What the job involves
- Upstart’s new LLM Platform team is building foundational infrastructure that democratizes access to generative AI for every product and engineering team across the company
- As a Senior Software Engineer on the LLM Platform team, you will help design and build a unified interface for securely interacting with large language models - abstracting away the complexity of model selection, prompt orchestration, evaluation, and scaling
- You'll help build a centralized GenAI layer that enables engineers to use best-in-class LLMs through clean APIs, configurable pipelines, and intuitive tooling
- Reporting to our Senior Director of Engineering, the team operates with broad scope and high visibility, partnering across Machine Learning, Product, and Compliance to ensure every model integration is performant, secure, and compliant
- Whether it's embedding LLMs in user-facing products or optimizing backend workflows, this team makes it seamless for Upstart Engineering to adopt and scale GenAI company-wide
- Build the LLM Platform powering generative AI use cases across all of Upstart Engineering
- Design and implement reliable, observable infrastructure for model inference, prompt orchestration, and data workflows
- Drive cross-functional adoption of AI tooling by delivering reusable components and intuitive interfaces.Increase developer productivity through automation, metrics dashboards, and streamlined GenAI integrations
- Set the technical roadmap for platform capabilities, balancing innovation with reliability and compliance
- Partner with ML researchers, product engineers, and design to bridge experimentation and production
- Ensure the platform adheres to emerging standards of security, fairness, and explainability for LLM systems
Our take
Business startups across the world usually seek out funding, but this is often difficult for companies led by millenials. Millennial entrepreneurs with an excellent track record in business are increasingly requiring access to these loans, but their lack of credit history results in proposals frequently being declined.
Upstart provides loans that are aimed towards the target audience of millennials with entrepreneurial intentions, offering low interest rates that average at 12%. The company claims these rates are 10% lower than traditional lenders, and the service aims towards ensuring that the client is subject to no further fees (such as prepayment penalties).
Upstart claims that its unique selling point lies in the fact that its loans are funded the day after approval. Whilst the service focuses on personal loans for business, the company has also expanded to offer loans for car refinancing. Over 2022 and 23, Upstart's stocks fell dramatically and an investigation was undertaken by a law firm representing the company's long-term investors over alleged security law violations by its board of directors. However, the end of 2023 saw a 20% stock value rise for Upstart after its partnership with Mutual Security Credit Union led to a rise in customers, indicating that it is on the up after a difficult two years.
Freddie
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
-16% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 6 rounds)
Apr 2019
$50m
SERIES D
Mar 2017
$32.5m
SERIES D
Total funding: $135.7m
Company benefits
- Comprehensive health plans
- 401k Plan
- Life insurance
- Disability insuranc
- Generous vacation policy
- Flexible time off
- Parental leave
- Technology equipment budget
- Personal development budget
- Various clubs and extracurricular activities
- Catered lunches
- Fully-stocked micro-kitchen
Company HQ
South San Mateo, San Mateo, CA
Leadership
David Girouard
(CEO)They started their career at Accenture and Booz Allen & Hamilton before working in Product Management at Apple and Virage. They left their role of 8 years as President of Enterprise at Google to found Upstart in March 2012.
Salary benchmarks
We don't have enough data yet to provide salary benchmarks for this role.
Submit your salary to help other candidates with crowdsourced salary estimates.
Share this job
View 65 more jobs at Upstart