--- title: 'Manager, Machine Learning Engineering at Tala' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/manager-machine-learning-engineering-tala-united-states-g8cd8vgts1qj' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-10-17' --- # Manager, Machine Learning Engineering at Tala - **Company:** Tala - **Location:** United States - **Compensation:** $170k–$210k - **Employment:** full-time - **Work type:** remote - **Posted:** 2026-09-17 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-17 - **Apply:** https://jobs.lever.co/tala/414d3726-20bc-4a89-9f82-66620943febb ## Job description ## About Tala Tala is the AI-native credit infrastructure that connects global capital to the global majority.  We combine proprietary risk intelligence with an expanding network of capital and distribution partners to power credit access at scale. To date, Tala has distributed more than $9 billion in capital to more than 14 million customers across Africa, Latin America, and Asia, building the definitive contextual dataset on thin-file borrowers in emerging markets. Tala is now converting that foundation into shared infrastructure that partners, capital providers, and ecosystems can build on. The company has been named to the Fortune Impact 20 list, CNBC’s World’s Top Fintech Companies twice, CNBC Disruptor 50 for five years, and Forbes’ Fintech 50 list for ten years running. Given the global nature of our team, we operate on a remote-first approach with office hubs in Santa Monica, CA (HQ); Nairobi, Kenya; Mexico City, Mexico; Manila, the Philippines; and Bangalore, India. Most Talazens join us because they connect with our mission. If you are energized by the impact you can make at Tala, we’d love to hear from you! ## What You'll Do Lead & Grow the Team - Manage and develop a team of 4–6 Machine Learning Engineers across mid-to-senior levels. - Hire, source, interview, and close strong MLE talent. - Establish clear expectations, provide regular feedback, and create development plans for direct reports. - Coach engineers toward growth and promotion while addressing performance gaps directly and thoughtfully. - Create opportunities for engineers to take on challenging projects and grow their technical leadership. Own Engineering Delivery - Set quarterly goals and ensure the team consistently delivers against them. - Own prioritization across product roadmap work, run-the-business activities, and operational excellence. - Balance team capacity across new development, maintenance, technical debt, and production support. - Improve team productivity by reducing context switching and delegating effectively. - Partner with engineers and technical leads to estimate and scope complex work. Provide Technical Leadership - Guide the development of platforms and frameworks that allow Data Scientists and Analysts to explore data, develop features, and train, test, deploy, and monitor ML models. - Provide technical leadership across model infrastructure, real-time inference, streaming feature extraction, batch processing, and production ML systems. - Drive strong engineering practices around testing, automation, observability, fault tolerance, infrastructure-as-code, and deployment. - Own and improve SLOs, on-call health, capacity planning, reliability, and incident response. - Review technical designs and help drive architectural standards and technical debt reduction. Partner Across the Organization - Work closely with Data Science, Data Engineering, Data Platform, Product, Credit, and Business Development teams. - Translate business and technical needs into scalable ML platform solutions. - Coordinate dependencies and delivery across multiple engineering and data teams. - Help create structure and clarity in an environment where priorities and requirements can evolve. ## What You'll Need Management Experience - 2+ years of directly managing engineers, including hiring, performance management, coaching, and career development. - Experience managing a team through at least one full performance cycle. - Demonstrated ability to coach engineers toward promotion and address underperformance effectively. - Experience owning team goals, prioritization, estimation, and delivery. - Experience with production on-call, incident response, and capacity planning. - Willingness to be actively involved in sourcing, interviewing, and closing engineering talent. Technical Experience - 6+ years of backend software engineering experience in consumer-scale applications. - At least 3 years of hands-on Python experience. - Experience building and operating machine learning or causal inference systems in production. - Earlier-career experience personally building and deploying ML models or ML infrastructure. - Ability to participate in technical architecture and system-design discussions and provide technical direction without needing to be the primary coder. - Strong understanding of software quality, security, reliability, testing, and production operations. Technical Skills We’re particularly interested in candidates with experience across: - Languages: Python, SQL - Machine Learning: Jupyter, Pandas, Scikit-Learn, XGBoost, TensorFlow, PyTorch, Hugging Face - Cloud & Infrastructure: AWS, GCP, Azure, Kubernetes, Docker - Streaming: Kafka, Kinesis, Beam, Flink, Spark Streaming - Batch Processing: Airflow, Metaflow - Databases: MySQL, PostgreSQL, Cassandra, Snowflake, Druid, and/or similar technologies - APIs: REST, GraphQL, gRPC, Protocol Buffers - Production Engineering: DevOps, SLOs, monitoring/observability, on-call, capacity planning, root-cause analysis - ML/Analytics: Machine learning, causal inference, scalable algorithms Our vision is to build a new financial ecosystem where everyone can participate on equal footing and access the tools they need to be financially healthy. We strongly believe that inclusion fosters innovation and we’re proud to have a diverse global team that represents a multitude of backgrounds, cultures, and experience. We hire talented people regardless of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, gender expression, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status. ## About Tala ## Company Overview - **One-liner**: Tala is a digital financial services company that provides instant credit, payments, savings, and transfer services to thin-file borrowers in emerging markets, using proprietary AI-native risk intelligence. - **Entity Type**: Private (Funding Stage: Late Stage / Series Unknown) - **Headquarters**: Santa Monica, California, United States - **Founded**: 2011 - **Founders**: Shivani Siroya ## Core Business - **Primary Industry**: Financial Services / Fintech - **Target Customers**: B2C (individuals and micro-entrepreneurs in emerging markets, primarily women), B2B (partners and capital providers licensing Tala’s credit infrastructure) - **Mission/Purpose**: To build a more just and equitable future by unlocking global economic progress for the "Global Majority"—the billions of people underserved by traditional financial systems. ## Products & Services - **Tala Money App**: A mobile-first platform offering instant access to credit (loans typically $10–$500), payments, savings, and transfer services. Available in Kenya, the Philippines, Mexico, and India. - **Tala Credit Infrastructure (Platform)**: An AI-native, API-driven underwriting engine built on a decade of behavioral lending data. Tala is opening this infrastructure to partners, platforms, and capital providers to power credit access at scale beyond its own app. ## Market Standing - **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly disclosed (Private company). - **Key Metric**: Total Funding of **$540.6M** raised across 12 rounds. - **Annual Revenue**: **$110M** (latest estimate). - **Notable Investors/Partners**: Upstart, Stellar Development Foundation, RPS Ventures, J. Safra Group, IVP, Revolution Growth, Lowercase Capital, and PayPal Ventures. - **Growth Signals**: - Deployed over **$8 billion** in capital to more than **14 million customers** to date. - Workforce of **465 employees** (+11.1% YoY), with offices in Santa Monica, Nairobi, Manila, Mexico City, and Bangalore. - Named to **Fortune’s Impact 20**, **CNBC’s Disruptor 50** (five consecutive years), and **Forbes’ Fintech 50** (nine consecutive years). - Transitioning from a single-app model to an open infrastructure platform for partners, signaling a major strategic pivot and expansion opportunity. ## Competitive Advantages - **Proprietary AI-Native Underwriting**: Built from the ground up for thin-file borrowers in informal economies, not retrofitted from legacy credit models. This gives Tala a unique, decade-deep behavioral dataset. - **First-Mover & Scale**: A decade of lending data across three continents (Africa, Latin America, Asia) creates a significant data moat that is hard for competitors to replicate. - **Strategic Pivot to Infrastructure**: By opening its credit intelligence to partners and capital providers, Tala moves from a customer-facing app to a shared infrastructure layer, vastly expanding its addressable market and defensibility. ## Strategic Focus - **Platform Expansion**: Converting its proprietary data, models, and customer relationships into shared infrastructure for third-party partners and capital providers. - **Market Penetration**: Deepening reach in existing markets (Kenya, Philippines, Mexico, India) and expanding the product suite beyond credit into payments, savings, and transfers. - **Regulatory & Partnership Growth**: Securing licenses (e.g., licensed digital credit provider by the Central Bank of Kenya) and forming partnerships (e.g., with Mexico’s CONDUSEF, Philippines’ Bayad Center) to build trust and scale. ## Why Work Here - **Mission-Driven**: The company is explicitly focused on financial inclusion for the "Global Majority," offering a strong sense of purpose. - **Remote-First & Flexible**: Tala is remote-first with flexible working hours and unlimited PTO. They offer "Sloth Days" and sabbaticals are a norm. Offices exist for in-person collaboration in Nairobi, Mexico City, Manila, Santa Monica, and Bangalore. - **Invested in Growth**: The company emphasizes continued learning and development, and provides space and support for employees to take their skills to the next level. - **Global Team**: A diverse, global workforce (14 countries) that reflects the diversity of its customers. - **Strong Culture Ratings**: Employer rating of **4.0/5.0** on LinkedIn (222 reviews), with high marks for Work-Life Balance (4.2) and Compensation (4.1). - **Engineering Culture**: Technical staff makes up ~25% of the workforce (118 out of 465). The company is building a cutting-edge AI-native credit infrastructure, offering challenging engineering problems. ## Sources 1. [tala.co](https://tala.co/about/) 2. [tala.co](https://tala.co/careers/) 3. [linkedin.com](https://linkedin.com/company/talamobile) 4. [en.wikipedia.org](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tala_Finance) 5. 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