Lead Machine Learning Engineer

At Digital Turbine, we make mobile advertising experiences more meaningful and rewarding for users, app publishers, and advertisers — intelligently connecting people in more ways, across more devices. We provide app publishers and advertisers with powerful ads and experiences that captivate consumers, fuel performance, and help telecoms and OEMs supercharge awareness, acquisition, and monetization. In a rapidly evolving industry, we are constantly innovating and creating better paths of discovery to connect consumers, publishers, and advertisers across the mobile ecosystem.

Please note that Digital Turbine is a hybrid work environment-only candidates local to the posting location will be considered.

Role Overview

We are seeking a Lead Machine Learning Engineer to serve as a technical authority and driver of our machine learning systems. In this role, you will lead the architecture, design, and productionizing of complex ML models and data pipelines that directly impact core product capabilities. You will operate with a high degree of autonomy, solving non-routine technical challenges, setting engineering standards, and providing technical leadership and mentorship to peer engineers without formal direct-report administration.

Key Responsibilities

Technical Leadership & Architecture

• •Lead the end-to-end design, architecture, and deployment of production-grade machine learning models and ML infrastructure.
• •Translate ambiguous, complex business problems into scalable ML engineering solutions and system specifications.
• •Establish MLOps best practices, operational standards, framework selections, and model monitoring/evaluation workflows across the team.
• •Evaluate emerging ML technologies, architectures, and tools to determine feasibility and adoption for the organization.

Execution & Hands-on Development

• •Write clean, maintainable, high-performance code (Python, C++, Scala, or equivalent) to build and optimize ML pipelines and training systems.
• •Design robust features, feature stores, and scalable data ingestion systems in collaboration with Data Engineering.
• •Drive model optimization, latency reduction, distributed training, and cost-efficient inference at scale.
• •Implement proactive monitoring for model drift, data quality, performance degradation, and system health in production.

Cross-Functional Collaboration & Mentorship

• •Act as the primary technical contact for product managers, domain experts, and executive stakeholders to align ML roadmaps with business goals.
• •Mentor and guide P1–P3 level Machine Learning Engineers through design reviews, code reviews, and pair engineering.
• •Partner with DevOps, Platform, and Security teams to ensure seamless deployment, governance, and infrastructure security.

Requirements

• •Education & Experience: Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Data Science, or related quantitative field with 8+ years of professional ML engineering experience.
• •Production ML: Proven track record of taking complex ML models from inception to high-scale production deployment (real-time and batch).
• •Frameworks & Tools: Deep expertise with modern ML frameworks (e.g., PyTorch, TensorFlow, Jax) and traditional ML libraries (e.g., Scikit-Learn, XGBoost).
• •MLOps & Infrastructure: Hands-on experience with orchestration, containerization, and MLOps platforms (e.g., Kubernetes, Docker, MLflow, Kubeflow, AWS SageMaker, GCP Vertex AI).
• •Software Engineering: Strong proficiency in data structures, algorithms, object-oriented design, distributed systems, and CI/CD automation.

Preferred Qualifications

• •Prior experience acting as a Technical Lead or Principal Contributor on high-impact engineering initiatives.
• •Expertise in LLM orchestration, fine-tuning, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), or modern generative AI systems.
• •Familiarity with distributed computing engines (e.g., Ray, Spark, Dask) and high-throughput databases (vector databases, feature stores).

About Digital Turbine:

Digital Turbine (NASDAQ: APPS) powers superior mobile consumer experiences and results for the world’s leading telcos, advertisers and publishers. Our end-to-end platform uniquely simplifies the ability to supercharge awareness, acquisition and monetization — connecting our partners to more consumers, in more ways, across more devices.

The company is headquartered in Austin, Texas, with global offices in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, London, Berlin, Singapore, Tel Aviv, and other cities around the world, serving top agency, app developer, and advertising markets.

We are honored to have achieved numerous awards as an employer of choice, around the world, including: BuiltIn's Best Places to Work Awards in 2022, 2023 and 2024, DUNS 100 Best Places to Work in Tech for 2023 and 2024, and BDICode's 100 Best Companies to Work in 2024.

Digital Turbine is an equal opportunity employer committed to exemplifying diversity and inclusion around the world. We welcome people of different backgrounds, experiences, abilities, and perspectives. We embed diversity in our mindset, products, and teams to empower an inclusive, equitable, and culturally fluent environment. Building and continuously fostering this culture within our teams makes us better collaborators, partners, and innovators.

Digital Turbine will process the information you provide during the application process in accordance with the Digital Turbine Global Recruitment Privacy Notice .