AppFolio Careers

Description

• Architect & Lead: Help define the technical vision and architecture for AI systems across Realm-X in partnership with senior leadership.
• Scale Intelligent AI Agents: Design and deploy advanced AI Agentic systems that combine reasoning, planning, and execution, including multi-agent orchestration across specialist agents (e.g., maintenance, leasing, accounting, collections).
• Improve the Foundation: Establish platform primitives and abstractions to enable context-aware, action-oriented AI that goes beyond simple assistance to true automation. Improve the standards for end-to-end ML systems: data collection, model training, evaluation, deployment, and inference infrastructure.
• Production Excellence: Architect and build scalable, multi-modal, and real-time AI applications, ensuring high-quality deployment standards.
• ML for Autonomous Property Management: Drive AppFolio's transition toward autonomous property management operations. Use existing LLMs today and instrument the proprietary data collection now that will let us selectively train, fine-tune, and RL-optimize open source LLM and SLM for the RPM domain — optimizing performance, latency, and cost.
• Reinforcement Learning for Agent Policies: Build the data and feedback loops needed to enable Reinforcement Learning over agent action policies in the partially observable, high-stakes property management environment.

• Systems thinker: You think in terms of systems, platforms, and long-term leverage, not just features.
• Production builder: You've built and scaled ML/AI systems in production with meaningful business impact.
• Ambiguity: You operate effectively in high ambiguity, turning unclear problems into a clear direction.
• Influence: You've led or influenced large, cross-team technical initiatives.
• Originality: You introduce new ideas, architectures, or paradigms — not just implement existing ones.
• Owner-operator: You bring a founder / owner-operator mindset: you take ownership, act with urgency, and focus on outcomes.
• Pace: You have a strong desire to move fast and deliver impact, while maintaining sound engineering judgment.
• Collaboration: You are humble, collaborative, and low-ego, and you elevate those around you.
• Sustainability: You value work-life balance as a foundation for sustained high performance.
• Vertical conviction: You bring genuine interest in winning a specific industry vertical (real estate) rather than chasing horizontal AI hype.

• Master's or Ph.D. in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or a related field (required).
• 10+ years of experience building software systems, with significant focus on ML/AI (or equivalent impact).
• Combined academic and industry track record: Published research and shipped production systems.
• Deep ML expertise: Traditional Machine Learning, Deep Learning, and Generative AI / LLMs (prompting, fine-tuning, RAG, agents, tool and skills use).
• LLM post-training: Direct, hands-on experience with LLM post-training — SFT, RLHF, DPO, and/or RL — at non-trivial scale.
• Full ML lifecycle: Strong understanding of data extraction, model training, evaluation, deployment, and integration into production software.
• Core stack: Expert in Python, PyTorch, NumPy, AWS, Docker, SQL, embeddings, and RAG.
• Agent tooling: Experience with LangChain, LangGraph, and LLM observability tools (LangSmith).
• Production ML at scale: Experience designing and operating production-grade ML systems at scale.
• Ontology & knowledge graphs: Applied experience with ontology-driven systems, knowledge graphs, or semantic layers used to model business domains for AI systems.
• AI-native engineering: Proficiency with AI coding tools and workflows (e.g., Copilot, ChatGPT, code generation tools).

• Reinforcement Learning depth: Deep RL expertise applied to sequential decision-making under partial observability.
• Experience designing evaluation and benchmarking systems for AI.
• Background in distributed systems and real-time architectures.
• Experience building platforms used by multiple engineering teams.
• Contributions to industry thought leadership (publications, talks, open source, etc.).

About AppFolio

AppFolio is the technology leader powering the future of the real estate industry. Our innovative platform and trusted partnership enable our customers to connect communities, increase operational efficiency, and grow their business. For more information about AppFolio, visit appfolio.com.

Why AppFolio

Grow | We enable a culture of high performance, where delivering results is recognized by opportunities for growth and compelling total rewards. Our challenging and meaningful work drive the growth of our business, and ourselves.

Learn | We partner with you to realize your potential by investing in you from the start. We're cultivating a team of big thinkers through coaching and mentorship with our best-in-class leaders, and giving you the time and tools to develop your skills.

Impact | We are creating a world where living in, investing in, managing, and supporting communities feels magical and effortless, freeing people to thrive. We do this by innovating with purpose while cultivating a culture of impact. We learn as much from each other as we do our customers and our communities.

Connect | We excel at hybrid work by fostering an environment that feels flexible, personal and connected, no matter where we are. We create space to fuel innovation and collaboration, and we come together to celebrate, connect, and succeed.

Paddle as One.

Learn more at appfolio.com/company/careers

Statement of Equal Opportunity

At AppFolio, we value diversity in backgrounds and perspectives and depend on it to drive our innovative culture. That’s why we’re a proud Equal Opportunity Employer, and we believe that our products, our teams, and our business are stronger because of it. This means that no matter what race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identification, national origin, age, marital status, ancestry, physical or mental disability, or veteran status, you’re always welcome at AppFolio.