Machine Learning Engineer

Branch Overview

Branch delivers world-class financial services to the mobile generation. With offices in the United States, Nigeria, Kenya, and India, Branch is a for-profit socially conscious company that uses the power of data science to reduce the cost of delivering financial services in emerging markets. We believe that everyone everywhere deserves fair financial access. The rapid spread of smartphones presents an opportunity for the world’s emerging middle class to access banking options and achieve financial flexibility.

Branch’s mission-driven team is led by the founder and former CEO of Kiva.org. The company presents a rich opportunity for our team members to drive meaningful growth in rapidly evolving and changing markets. In 2019, Branch announced our Series C and garnered more than $100M in funding with investments from leading Silicon Valley firms, including Andreessen Horowitz, Trinity Capital, Foundation Capital, Visa, and the International Finance Corporation (IFC).

As a company, we are passionate about our customers, fearless in the face of barriers, and driven by data. As a product-driven org, we value bottom-up innovation and decentralized decision-making. We believe the best ideas can come from anyone in the company, and we create an environment where everyone feels empowered to propose solutions to the challenges we face.

We value diversity and are committed to providing an inclusive working environment where human beings of all backgrounds can thrive.

Job Overview
Branch launched in India in early 2019 and has seen rapid adoption and growth. We are expanding our product portfolio as well as our user base in all our markets including India. We are looking for talented Machine Learning Engineers to join us and be part of this journey. You will work closely with other Engineers, Product Managers, and underwriters to develop, improve, and deploy machine learning models and to solve other optimization problems. We make extensive use of machine learning in our credit product, where it is used (among other things) for underwriting and loan servicing decisions. We are also actively exploring other applications of Machine Learning in some of our newer products, with the ultimate goal of improving the user experience.

Machine Learning sits at the intersection of a number of different disciplines: Computer Science, Statistics, Operations Research, Data Science, and others. At Branch, we fundamentally believe that in order for Machine Learning to be impactful, it needs to be closely embedded into the rest of the product development and software engineering process, which is why we emphasize the importance of software engineering skills and experience for this role.

As a company, we are passionate about our customers, fearless in the face of barriers, and driven by data. As an engineering team, we value bottom-up innovation and decentralized decision-making. We believe the best ideas can come from anyone in the company, and we are working hard to create an environment where everyone feels empowered to propose solutions to the challenges we face. We are looking for individuals who thrive in a fast-moving, innovative, and customer-focused setting.
 

• Credit Decisions: Core to our business is understanding and building signals from unstructured and structured data to identify good borrowers.
• Customer Service: Using machine learning and LLM/NLP, automate customer service interactions and provide context to our customer service team.
• Fraud Prevention: Identify patterns of fraudulent behavior and build models to detect and prevent these behaviors.
• Team work: Bring your experience to bear on the technical direction and abilities of the team, and work cross-functionally with policy and product teams as we improve processes and break new ground.

• 2+ years of hands-on experience building software in a production environment. Startup or early-stage team experience is preferred.
• Excellent software engineering and programming skills, especially Python and SQL.
• A diverse range of data skills, including experimentation, statistics, and machine learning, and have used these skills to inform business decisions.
• A deep understanding of using cloud computing infrastructure and data pipelines in production.
• Self motivation: You teach yourself new skills. You take the initiative to solve problems before they arise. You roll up your sleeves and get stuff done.
• Team motivation: You listen to others, speak your mind, and ask the right questions. You are a great collaborator and teacher.
• The drive to make a positive impact on customers' lives.

• Mission-driven, fast-paced, and entrepreneurial environment
• Competitive salary and equity package
• A collaborative and flat company culture
• Fully-paid Group Medical Insurance and Personal Accidental Insurance
• Unlimited paid time off, including personal leave, bereavement leave, and sick leave
• Fully paid parental leave — 6 months maternity leave and 3 months paternity leave
• Monthly WFH stipend alongside a one-time home office set-up budget
• $500 Annual professional development budget
• Team meals and social events — Virtual and In-person