AppFolio · 2 days ago
Sr. Data Scientist, AI Delivery/Deployment
Santa Barbara, CA
Full-time
Hybrid
Senior Level
$138K/yr - $173K/yr
6+ years expAppFolio is a technology leader in the real estate industry, focused on delivering innovative cloud and AI solutions. The Sr. Data Scientist will lead the design and implementation of ML/AI workflows, partnering with stakeholders to translate business challenges into actionable insights while ensuring the responsible deployment of AI technologies.
AnalyticsComputerInformation TechnologyProperty ManagementPropTechSaaSSoftwareWeb Hosting
Responsibilities
Deploy End-to-End ML/AI: Lead the design and delivery of custom ML/AI workflows, ranging from classical regression and classification models to agentic LLM systems
Strategic Partnership: Navigate ambiguity by partnering with product, business, and engineering stakeholders to translate complex business challenges into concrete ML/AI roadmaps
Drive ML Explainability & Narrative Insights: Translate complex "black-box" model predictions and feature importance into human-readable narratives. You will build the translation layer that makes sophisticated data science insights accessible and actionable for executive stakeholders
Operationalize Value-Focused Observability: Design and implement observability frameworks to track the full lifecycle of deployments, monitoring business ROI and model health
Standardize Infrastructure & Engineering: Establish reusable code libraries, modeling frameworks, and orchestration standards to accelerate model delivery
Qualification
Required
Technical Prowess – You possess the mathematical depth to build sophisticated models and the software engineering rigor to deploy them
Deployment Mindset – You don't consider a project 'done' when the notebook is finished; you thrive on the challenge of getting models into the hands of users and keeping them running at scale
Business Acumen – You understand key challenges facing our business and partner with stakeholders to find creative ways to apply AI to solve them
Communication & Storytelling – You can translate complex technical concepts into compelling narratives for non-technical stakeholders. You are comfortable presenting to leadership, justifying AI investments with ROI, and setting the vision of AI initiatives across the company
Efficiency – Able to quickly iterate on data generation and refinement. Looks for ways to improve processes to maximize efficiency and remove redundancy
Custom LLM Workflow Experience: Proven track record of customizing and deploying LLM workflows for specific, non-generic use cases
Classical ML Mastery: Advanced knowledge of classical machine learning techniques such as regression and classification
Bachelor's Degree in a STEM field and minimum 6 years of experience in a related field
Cloud Services Expertise: Demonstrated experience working with and deploying models within major cloud environments (AWS, Azure, GCP, or Snowflake)
Data Translation: Deep understanding of Feature Importance (SHAP/LIME) and how to map these values to semantic context
Strong programming background (Python, SQL, version control, system design) with experience writing production-grade, modular code
Effective Communication: Strong listening and interpersonal skills; ability to communicate with cross-functional partners in both technical and business terms
Preferred
Snowflake Proficiency: Hands-on experience navigating the broader Snowflake Data Cloud ecosystem (Snowpark, Cortex, Streamlit)
Vector Database Experience: Familiarity with vector search architectures or managed vector search offerings (e.g., Pinecone, Weaviate, Cortex Search)
Model Context Protocol (MCP): Familiarity with MCP for creating standardized, interoperable connections between LLMs and data sources or proprietary tools
Experience building AI Agents for automated code-refactoring or SQL generation
Experience using dbt (data build tool) or orchestration frameworks such as Airflow
Company
AppFolio
AppFolio is a cloud business management solutions provider for the real estate industry.
1001-5000 employees
H1B Sponsorship
AppFolio has a track record of offering H1B sponsorships. Please note that this does not
guarantee sponsorship for this specific role. Below presents additional info for your
reference. (Data Powered by US Department of Labor)
Distribution of Different Job Fields Receiving Sponsorship
Represents job field similar to this job
Trends of Total Sponsorships
2025 (18)
2024 (24)
2023 (22)
2022 (34)
2021 (51)
2020 (35)
Funding
Current Stage
Public CompanyTotal Funding
$30MKey Investors
Investment Group of Santa BarbaraCisco,HeadlineHeadline
2015-06-26IPO
2013-11-01Series Unknown
2009-08-18Series C· $8M
Leadership Team
Shane Trigg
President and CEO
Tim Eaton
Chief Financial Officer
Recent News
2025-11-25
Company data provided by crunchbase