Senior Staff AI/ ML Engineer
Our way of doing things in the team
iFood moves more than 80 million orders per month, and behind every incredible experience, we have Machine Learning models and AI agents making real-time decisions. We are looking for the person who will define how AI operates at scale at iFood: someone who thinks beyond the model, sees the complete system, and translates strategy into a technical roadmap for the next 12-24 months. If you want to work at the intersection of high-performance engineering and the frontier of generative AI, leading multiple teams, mentoring engineers, and creating solutions that impact millions of users every day: this is your opportunity.
Your Daily Menu
MLOps & Serving Strategy: Define the MLOps strategy for the organization. Design serving platforms that support multiple frameworks and paradigms (batch, real-time, agents). Establish CI/CD for ML models as an organizational standard, with formal governance (model cards, approval workflows, model registry).
AI Agents Engineering: Define the AI agents strategy for the organization. Design architectures that scale to multiple domains, involving orchestration, tool calling, memory, RAG, evals, and guardrails. Design how agents interact with iFood's semantic data layer.
FinOps & ML Infrastructure: Lead FinOps initiatives for ML: cross-team computational cost reduction, infrastructure migrations (on-demand to spot, GPU generations), intelligent auto-scaling. Design a platform that serves multiple teams with different needs.
Responsible AI & Governance: Contribute to the definition of responsible AI use policies (bias, fairness, safety, PII protection). Ensure that model governance incorporates responsible AI. Implement robust guardrails against hallucinations, prompt injection, and data leakage.
Mentorship & Technical Leadership: Mentor engineers and data scientists in MLOps and GenAI. Write RFCs and ADRs that define technical standards for the domain. Organize and strengthen the technical community (guilds, tech talks, shared standards). Raise the technical bar for multiple teams.
Health & Observability: Lead technical excellence of systems, creating plans for quality assurance and failure mitigation. Monitor regressions (drift, error rates) and coordinate system evolutions to maintain the cohesion of the ML platform.
Ingredients we are looking for
Scale MLOps Strategy: Experience defining MLOps strategy for multiple teams — not just operating, but designing how the organization takes models to production safely and reproducibly
AI Agents Architecture: Experience designing agents in production that reason, use tools, and handle errors — including standardization of guardrails, evals, and observability at an organizational level
FinOps for ML: Management of computational cost as a discipline — GPU, spot instances, auto-scaling — with a cross-team optimization vision, not just one-off
Model Governance: Model cards, registries, approval workflows, and auditability as a practice, not as a checklist
Responsible AI: Experience defining or applying fairness, bias, and safety policies in models and agents
Technical mentorship: A track record of multiplication — mentoring engineers, leading guilds, raising technical standards in teams that are not your own
To Enhance the Flavor
AI-operable vision: Ability to think beyond the model, anticipating how the complete system will evolve — and translating this into a 12-24 month roadmap
Multi-tenant platform: Experience designing ML platforms that serve multiple teams with different needs
Inner source / Open source: Contributions to projects beyond your domain — RFCs, ADRs, shared libraries
Advisory for leadership: Experience as a technical advisor to senior stakeholders, connecting AI strategy to business strategy
Applied research: PoCs and research that introduced new capabilities to the team
Intermediate/advanced English: For contact with international teams of the iFood ecosystem
We seek a person passionate about innovation and technology, who is always seeking new learning and enjoys challenges. If you identify with this profile, we would love to meet you!
About us
At iFood, we believe in the power of diversity to generate #Innovation and achieve incredible #Results, therefore, we make no distinction for candidates with disabilities, gender, sexual orientation, race/ethnicity, age, origin, family constitution, and aesthetics. We have groups composed of volunteer foodlovers, where we talk about Race, Gender, LGBTQI+, and PcD; we want to be the company where people choose as a place where they will develop and contribute to the realization of dreams, #AllTogether.
Meet our initiatives →
What are you hungry for?
We, FoodLovers, are hungry for innovation and results. We always seek to do our best, thinking "outside the box" and acting with agility and responsibility! We are hungry for diversity, knowledge, and sharing. We work in an environment of great versatility. Do you know what promotes our special recipe? People! Come be a part of this🤝