Software Engineer, Machine Learning Operations

Job description

**Work at Blissway: Opportunity for Impact Every Day 🚀✨** Blissway is a startup that simplifies toll collection and dramatically improves highway safety. We are multiple startups in one: **Deep Tech, AI/ML, Hardware, SaaS, and IoT.** For the past five years, we have built a nearly insurmountable technological lead in tolling, a roughly $200B global industry expected to double in the next decade. We work for toll authorities and state DOTs, and we own the whole system, from the roadside camera to the final bill, so every vehicle we see becomes one accurate toll transaction and nothing more. While our competitors have thousands of employees, we operate with a lean but growing team of less than 30. Our impact is visible on the massive Interstate Highway System connecting every major US metro (except Juneau, AK—sorry, Juneau). **You are a good fit if...** - **You love the grind:** You take ownership and put in the time to meet deadlines. Our recent team survey showed an average of 55 hours/week, with occasional 70+ hour bursts for major releases. - **You are detail obsessed:** You have experience writing code, designing or building systems that stands up to the unpredictability of the physical world, where the small details are the difference between success and failure. - **You are adaptable:** We are a lean team. If you only want to work on a "niche thing" or are uncomfortable helping other teams when they need a boost, this isn't the place for you. We expect you to figure out what you need to get stuff done. - **You code really well:** We mostly use Python and TypeScript, but we don’t care what you’re most proficient in today—as long as you learn fast. - **You value working together in person:** You’re excited to work alongside the team at our Denver office. This role is in-office on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, with flexibility to work remotely on Tuesdays and Thursdays. ## **The Mission:** Every image on our system has one job: complete an accurate toll transaction through a billing system we run and audit ourselves. Your job is keeping the models behind that transaction accurate and reliable. We process 11 million images a day, using detection, segmentation, classification, embeddings, and re-identification to match each vehicle to its toll. You'll own the infrastructure, deployment, and monitoring that take a model to the road, and the updates that keep it correct once it's there. This role is for the engineer who sees a great model stuck in a notebook and can't rest until it's running reliably in production. **The Work** - **Own the Platform:** We wire it all together and run our own servers. You own the infrastructure behind every model we ship: training and serving infrastructure, model versioning, deployment, and rollback. - **Vision at Real Scale:** 11 million images a day across vehicles, license plates, wheels, and lane markings. At this volume, a faster pipeline or a cheaper inference path saves money every day. - **Real Hardware in the Real World:** We own the devices in the field, so the systems you build run on roads, not just in a test environment. - **Edge and Cloud:** Most of our compute lives in the cloud, where power is effectively unlimited. We're now pushing more inference onto roadside hardware, which is a completely different problem. You'll build the path that gets models onto edge devices, keeps them updated, and tells us when something drifts. - **Maintain What Matters:** Your job is making sure the model stays correct. You build the monitoring that catches degradation before anyone else does, and you own the updates that fix it. - **How We Handle Data:** We work only for toll authorities and state DOTs, on legislatively authorized toll roads. The laws governing our work prohibit keeping data unless it's used to charge a toll. There is no search-by-plate interface, no cross-agency lookup network, and no standing law enforcement access. Data leaves our system only through the same legal process that applies to any company's billing records. **Requirements** - **Experience:** 2 to 6 years of full-time software engineering experience building and running production systems, such as infrastructure, backend services, or ML platforms. - **Production Fundamentals:** You write production-quality code and build reliable systems: pipelines, deployment, observability, and the tooling that keeps them running. - **ML Curiosity:** You don't need to design novel architectures. You may have deployed models before, or you may be a strong engineer who wants to go deep on ML. Either way, you understand, or are eager to learn, how models are trained and evaluated well enough to debug them in production. - **Python:** Fluent in Python. - **Bonus:** Experience taking ML models past the notebook (deployment, monitoring, retraining), deploying to edge or resource-constrained hardware, or running your own servers instead of fully managed cloud services. **The Interview Process** We're a selectively small team, which means a deliberate and thorough interview process with 3-4 interviews and a final paid work trial. In exchange, you get real autonomy from day one, direct access to the people setting technical direction, and work that ships to roads in weeks, not quarters. **The Essentials (Health & Wealth)** - **Relocation Support:** We are excited for you to join the team at our engineering office in Denver. We value in-person collaboration and daily team lunches and we provide a relocation bonus to help you get here. - **Personalized Health Coverage (ICHRA):** We don’t believe in one-size-fits-all healthcare. We provide a monthly allowance for you and dependents so you can choose the individual plan that actually fits *your* life. - **Investing in Your Future:** 401(k) matching up to 4%. - **Peace of Mind:** Transparent compensation. Company-sponsored life & disability insurance. - **Early Stage Equity:** Competitive equity package. Every year, we facilitate a tender process that gives you the opportunity to sell your vested shares at the same valuation as our investors. **Rest & Recharge 🌴** - **High-Trust Time Off:** 4 weeks of untracked PTO. We don't micromanage your calendar; we focus on your impact. Take the time you need to stay sharp and inspired. - **Family First:** 12 weeks of paid parental leave for birth and adoptive parents. We want you present for the moments that matter most. - **The Deep Breath (Sabbatical):** Every 5 years, take 12 weeks of fully paid leave**.** Go travel, write a book, or master a new hobby—then come back and tell us all about it. **Fuel & Community 😀** - **The Blissway Kitchen:** Whether it’s breakfast to start your day or our daily group lunches, we keep the team fueled. - **Snacks Autonomy:** Our kitchen is fully stocked and we mean it—if we’re missing your favorite fuel, just add it to the request list. - **The "BlissTrip":** An annual 4-day getaway for the team and significant others. - **Monthly Beats:** Game nights, escape rooms, and dinners to celebrate the grit we put in. - **Continuous Learning:** Tuition reimbursement for courses, programs, and conferences that sharpen your craft.