AI/ML Engineer - Relational Foundation Models & Predictive Intelligence

Kumo
Chicago, US
On-site

Job Description

Join the Kumo Team

Kumo is building the next generation of AI for structured data. With our Relational Foundation Model (RFM), we help some of the world’s largest companies transform their data into predictions, decisions, and end-to-end automated systems.

Our culture is collaborative, fast-moving, and deeply user-obsessed. We value people who take initiative, learn quickly, communicate clearly, and enjoy solving hard technical + people challenges.

Why This Role (and Why Now)

Demand for Predictive AI is accelerating faster than ever. Our customers include some of the world’s most influential enterprises across retail, e-commerce, consumer goods, fintech, travel, and technology. These organizations operate at true global scale, hundreds of ML models, billions of data points, and business-critical use cases across recommendations, forecasting, supply chain optimization, fraud, CRM, and more.

We are rapidly expanding our Applied Machine Learning team, a high-impact, highly technical group that sits at the center of our customer engagements. This team guides customers from their very first pilot all the way through to scaled, production-grade deployments of relational predictive models.

This is a unique opportunity for someone who is:

  • Curious and intellectually hungry, always excited to dive into a new dataset, new model class, or unfamiliar industry.
  • Energized by startup culture, where you move fast, learn constantly, and see the impact of your work immediately.
  • Motivated by high-growth environments, both personally and professionally, where the ceiling keeps rising as the company scales.
  • Excited to become an expert practitioner of cutting-edge AI models applied across dozens of real-world use cases.
  • Thrilled by the chance to work directly with Silicon Valley innovators, global brands, and leaders in data science and the business.

What You’ll Do

Support and eventually own technical success for enterprise customers adopting the Kumo platform.

Design and build prototypes, workflows, and models across use cases such as:

  • Recommendations & personalization
  • Forecasting & demand planning
  • Fraud detection & risk modeling
  • Supply chain & logistics optimization
  • Banking & financial analytics
  • CRM/growth marketing & user modeling
  • Work hands-on with large-scale relational datasets, customer pipelines, and production ML systems.
  • Guide customers through modeling choices, data structures, evals, trust, interpretability, and rollout plans.
  • Translate ambiguous customer needs into concrete ML solutions and RFM workflows.
  • Collaborate closely with Kumo engineering and research teams to improve platform capabilities.
  • Act as a technical leader and trusted advisor, understanding that deploying ML is as much a people and business challenge as it is a technical one.
  • Deliver demos, workshops, best practices, and partner with executives, PMs, analysts, and data scientists.

Minimum Qualifications

  • Bachelor’s or Master’s in a STEM field (CS, EE, Math, Physics, Stats, etc).
  • Strong fundamentals in data science, statistics, or machine learning coursework.
  • Real-world experience via internships, research, industry work, or substantial project work.
  • Demonstrated intellectual curiosity and initiative, personal ML/AI projects, open source, research, hackathons, or other hands‑on experience.
  • Strong communication skills; comfortable working with people and navigating technical + non‑technical audiences.
  • Genuine enthusiasm for ML/AI, modern modeling approaches, and applying them to real business problems.
  • Motivated, self‑driven, excited to learn fast, and comfortable in a high‑velocity startup environment.

Preferred Qualifications (Bring Strength in at Least One Area)

Deeper expertise in one or more of:

  • ML infrastructure / data engineering
  • Full‑stack development for ML apps
  • LLM orchestration, agent systems, or model tuning
  • Large‑scale distributed systems
  • Forecasting, recsys, fraud, or other applied ML domains
  • Familiarity with GNNs, temporal models, or structured reasoning.
  • Enterprise integrations, data platforms, or productionizing ML

(We do not expect candidates to have all of these. Deep strength in one area + strong Data Science fundamentals is ideal.)

Working Model

  • Hybrid: 1+ in‑person days per week with teammates located in Chicago, IL.
  • Onboarding: 1–2 weeks in person at our SF Bay Area HQ.
  • Start dates:
  • Full‑time starting January or onwards (open to early graduates).
  • Part‑time (30 hrs/week) available immediately with option to convert to full time after graduation.

Success Looks Like (First 3–6 Months)

  • Support and eventually lead multiple major customer engagement, delivering real business impact.
  • Solve multiple challenging predictive machine learning problems, by applying data science skills to large-scale datasets.
  • Build prototypes and workflows using RFM that demonstrate value and drive adoption.
  • Collaborate with e

Skills & Requirements

Technical Skills

Ai/mlStructured dataRecommendations & personalizationForecasting & demand planningFraud detection & risk modelingSupply chain & logistics optimizationBanking & financial analyticsCrm/growth marketing & user modelingLarge-scale relational datasetsCustomer pipelinesProduction ml systemsCuriosityIntellectual hungerInitiativeLearning quicklyCommunicationSolving hard technical + people challengesStartup cultureHigh-growth environmentsDeploying mlRetailE-commerceConsumer goodsFintechTravelTechnology

Salary

$30+

hour

Employment Type

FULL TIME

Level

junior

Posted

4/14/2026

Apply Now

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