Lead Software Engineer - Machine Learning

About Us

Monarch came out of private beta in early 2021. Since that time we have quickly become one of the premier ways to manage your financial life. Customers love the product and we have seen rapid, organic growth. Our users say that Monarch helps them feel more confident in their finances, and more confident in their financial future.

Our founding team consists of product-driven, serial entrepreneurs with multiple exits. Additionally, our CEO was one of the original creators of Mint.com and has a unique perspective on what is needed to meet consumers' needs in this market.

We are passionate about building a company, product and brand that both customers and employees love. We are well-funded by top venture firms and angel investors.

We founded the company as a fully-remote team (pre Covid!) and are open to applicants that live within a 5 hour time zone difference of US Pacific Time.

The Role

Monarch Money is seeking an experienced Software Engineer with a focus on Machine Learning. We are big believers in using the power of ML/AI (and in particular, GenAI) to help people process and understand their finances, as well as make plans for and automate future improvements to their financial lives.

Your Contribution

• As our first ML engineer, you will play a critical role in proposing, exploring, and executing how we use ML in Monarch Money's existing and future product features.

• You will be more than just an ML craftsperson; you will also be a thought partner in building a product, company, and culture we are proud of.

• You will typically work with a lot of autonomy, and be expected to 'own' the full implementation of whatever you work on.

• Be a thought-leader / industry-expert that helps the company stay abreast of the latest developments in this rapidly-evolving space.

Responsibilities

• Help propose, gather and prioritize ideas on how we can harness ML to pursue Monarch's mission of improving household's personal financial lives.

• Rapidly prototype and experiment with early ideas to assess feasibility and impact.

• Train, evaluate, and tune ML models.

• Work with the Product Engineering and Data teams to gather and preprocess the appropriate datasets.

• Deploy ML models to production.

• Help build ML infra and tooling where appropriate.

Requirements

Not all of the below are strict requirements—interest/passion/intellect can often be more valuable than experience. That said, we'd love to see:

• Experience with GenAI, including using techniques like Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) and Agentic models, as well as evaluation techniques for GenAI models.

• Experience with 'classic' ML models (pre-GenAI), in particular ones focused on Natural Language Processing (NLP)—everything from TF-IDF and SVMs to BERT and Word2Vec. Be comfortable with generating/using embeddings.

• Great collaboration/communication skills and a sharp product sense.

• Comfort working with large-scale data, especially sensitive.

Example Work

While we expect you to help us form our roadmap for this role, some early work we anticipate doing in the first few months might include:

• Transaction enrichment. We process tens of millions of transactions per day and are on track to be ingesting/processing a sizable percentage of all transactions conducted by US households, and need to classify/categorize/name these transactions. We have some early prototypes that use GenAI to achieve best-in-industry accuracy.

• Conversational agent. We have started experimenting with a 'Monarch Assistant' that lets users talk to their money. While it still has a lot of room to improve, users have found it useful to quickly answer questions about their finances and generate custom charts/reports.

• In-product recommendations. Helping users quickly surface/find the right information in Monarch.

• Augmenting financial professional. Many Monarch users work with a financial professional to help with their taxes, their financial planning, their investment management, etc. We believe we can leverage ML to improve that relationship.

Benefits 

• Work wherever you want! As a fully remote company with no central office, we want you to work wherever you are happiest and most productive. Whether that’s out of your home, a co-working space, or elsewhere.

• Competitive cash and equity compensation in a hyper growth, early stage company 🚀.

• Stipend to set-up your ideal working environment.

• Medical, dental and vision benefits (Full time US only).

• 401k (US only).

• Unlimited PTO.

• 3 day weekend every month! We take off the “First Friday” every month to focus on rest, recuperation, or just having fun!

We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.