Lead Machine Learning Engineer - StreamLine Label & Integrations Team

About Topanga

At Topanga, we’re transforming kitchen operations with AI-powered solutions that help leading commercial kitchens waste less and save more. Our products, including the award-winning ReusePass program and StreamLine, a food waste mitigation and workflow automation tool, are used by industry leaders to drive measurable impact and cost savings. Win. Win.

We’re an early-stage technology company with product-market fit, entering our next phase of explosive growth. We have a strong sense of mission and direction, accompanied by constant testing and iteration.

Our team is a passionate mix of technologists, foodies, designers, and problem solvers who believe that building efficient systems can create a future of abundance. We’re passionate about solving hard problems—through questioning, debate, and ultimately committing to a shared direction, we create solutions that matter.

What to Expect

Today, we're a remote-first team with a main office hub in LA, where the team goes in 2-3 days per week. The rest of our team is distributed across the U.S., with a growing presence in NYC. We strive to compensate and offer benefits that are above market for the given role and stage of the company. Pay may be a combination of salary, commission, and/or equity depending on role and seniority. Full time employees are eligible for health benefits and 401k enrollment.

You should expect a self-regulated PTO policy and a culture that promotes using at least three continuous weeks every year. (Yes, 12 days of camping with no cell service is encouraged—fresh air is good for us). We sign off at 2:30 p.m. on Fridays, observe long weekends, and respect that some days, you wake up and your head just ain’t in it.

We encourage each other's pursuit of hobbies, passions, and experiences outside of work. We acknowledge that careers tend to be zig-zags, not straight lines. This is great as long as the time spent working is fulfilling. Basically, our jobs do not define us, but they can add purpose.

The role

The Lead Machine Learning Engineer sits on the StreamLine Label & Integrations team and reports to the CTO. This role is responsible for leading development of Topanga’s implementation of classical and foundational models to achieve accurate and performant machine understanding of food production data sets. This will include defining the strategy, developing and testing different approaches, collaborating with the Lead Software Engineer to define production deployment architecture, and performing the technical execution of the plan. This role will also contribute to the longer term strategic use of AI across Topanga’s product lines.

• Experience applying foundational LLM models to solve real problems, including deploying, fine-tuning, and integrating these models into production environments.
• Worked on prompt engineering, experimenting with different approaches to enhance task-specific LLM performance.
• 5+ years of experience as a software engineer with a strong focus on backend development.
• Proficiency in Python.
• Experience using statistical methods to measure performance improvements of different models and implementations of the same model.

• Experience improving performance of multi modal LLMs with image and/or audio input.
• Experience integrating RLHF workflows into performance tuning.
• Experience building within AWS using services such as Lambda, DynamoDB, AppSync GraphQL, etc.
• Experience working with ML models other than foundational LLMs. Yes, there was a before time.