Principal Software Engineer / Tech Lead, Head of Real-Time Bidding (ML Ops)

About Trellis

Trellis is a profitable, fast-growing, Series A start-up backed by leading VC’s like General Catalyst, QED, NYCA, and Amex Ventures.

Join our mission to simplify and automate shopping for home and auto insurance.

Our ML-powered insurance recommendations, and our GenAI-powered conversational interface, enable us to insure everyday Americans faster, cheaper, and smarter.

We’re fully remote. We believe it allows us to find the best talent wherever it is, provide our team with maximum flexibility, and stand out to candidates.

Trellis is led by third-time fintech entrepreneur, Daniel Demetri, who has previously founded multiple fintech and insurtech startups that now operate as publicly-traded companies.

Our Values

1. Extreme Ownership – We fulfill our promises to each other and to our customers. We own our responsibilities 110%.
2. Speed – We work quickly and pragmatically. We move fast and get things done.
3. Craft – We are constantly learning and bettering ourselves and the way we work.
4. Collaboration – We work transparently, solicit feedback, and leave our egos at the door.
5. Positivity – We see a cup half-full, focus on the team's potential, and rise to challenges.

Your Mission: 

Reporting directly to the CEO, the Principal Software Engineer / Tech Lead, Head of Real-Time Bidding will be directly responsible to:

Maximize ROI on >$100 million per year of programmatic marketing spend – About $2 billion per year of insurance shopping leads are programmatically auctioned every year in the US. We expect to spend over $100 million next year on these API-based, real-time auctions. Additionally, traditional digital media and other marketing channels offer additional programmatic customer acquisition opportunities. This position will own and grow our efforts to programmatically bid and acquire insurance shoppers, ensuring maximum ROI.

Your Goals: 

1. Smarter and Smarter Customer Acquisition
   • Increasingly intelligent, enabling increased precision, win rates and ROI/ROAS
   • Expansion to new marketing platforms and channels (e.g. video advertising!)
   • Responsiveness – e.g. fast adaptation to rapid shifts in marketplace supply or demand
     
     
2. High-Quality Platform
   • Low frequency and severity of errors, bugs, and regressions
   • Low latency (auctions often timeout in a fraction of a second)
   • High availability (outages cost us opportunity)
   • Science friendly (we will often need to experiment to test various hypotheses about the market and our audience)
     
     
3. High-Quality Team
   • Hire, motivate, manage, and up-skill 1-2 top-quality Sr. Eng hires

What You’ll Need to Succeed:

1. Extensive Backend Engineering Experience – This role will be nearly entirely focused on API-based customer acquisition, so the technical focus is on our backend. An ability to quickly ramp up on – and exercise best practices in – Python and NodeJS is required.

2. Experience productionalizing Machine Learning (ML) - You'll need a working familiarity with how to best collect, manage, and govern data, including both raw data as well as intermediate model predictions. You'll need familiarity with how to solve challenges like model versioning, split testing, and alignment of feature engineering between production and model training.

3. Product/Business Chops – You will have executive-level P&L responsibility. Thus, you will need to be able to bone up on our business, accurately model our product domain, effectively prioritize projects and tickets, and be able to converse about technical ideas and trade-offs from the perspective of a business owner.

4. Organization – Our team manages an incredibly wide surface area of software. Keeping tabs on everything requires the design and execution of systems and processes.

5. Motivational and Positive Attitude – As a people and hiring manager on the engineering team, building trust, respect, and rapport with staff, stakeholders, and prospective new hires will be essential.

6. Comfort with Data – The more comfortable you are with techniques for optimally storing, accessing, analyzing, and predicting data, the more effective you will be able to be in the role. This spans familiarity with how to store data for auditing, transform data for analysis, access and analyze large corpuses cost-efficiently, launch and maintain machine learning in production, scientifically analyze experiments, and more.

7. A Brisk Pace – We don’t need a “pre-seed” sprinter/prototyper, but we also can’t operate like FAANG molasses. We need a strong context switcher who can quickly ramp up on new types of problems, think on their feet, exhibit a bias for action, and avoid letting perfect be the enemy of the good.

Compensation 

• Cash – Up to $300-$600k, depending on seniority
• Equity – Up to 1%, depending on seniority

Trellis is a fantastic place to work

Join a talented, passionate team:

• Flat, collaborative, transparent culture; get in at the ground floor and be a true business partner
• Opportunities for growth and development within your role and all areas of the organization
• 75th-percentile (competitive!) compensation
• 100% remote work environment
• Quarterly, fun team bonding events

Trellis additionally offers competitive benefits:

• Unlimited vacation time
• 100% employer-paid Platinum-tier health insurance for employee, 60% for dependents
• Flexible Spending Accounts (FSAs)
• 401(k) retirement savings plan
• Bonuses and equity opportunities
• Budget for home office equipment