The posting, in PPRO's own words
archived Oct 1, 2026At PPRO, we simplify access to local payments - providing a local payments platform that empowers giants like PayPal, Stripe, and Microsoft to connect with billions of consumers worldwide. We are on an ambitious, fast-paced mission to 3x our growth by 2028 - and we’re just getting started. Our magic lies in our team of proud payments nerds. Spanning over 50 nationalities across 10+ global locations, our diverse cultures aren't a checklist; they are the competitive advantage driving our innovation. This is a people-first, high trust environment where you’ll have the autonomy to make a massive impact, own your work end-to-end, and grow through broad exposure, meaningful challenges, and continuous learning. We get things done, challenge respectfully, put the customer first, and recognise that our biggest successes are those we create as a team. If you’re ready to leave your footprint on global commerce, join us.
The Purpose:
As a Staff Machine Learning Engineer in PPRO's Performance Powerhouse team, you will define the technical vision and architecture for ML-driven payment optimization across the organization. You will move beyond executing well-defined problems to identifying and framing the highest-leverage opportunities—bridging strategy, architecture, and execution across multiple teams. You'll partner deeply with Product, Data, Core Payments, and Platform Engineering to set standards, eliminate systemic bottlenecks, and ensure PPRO's ML capabilities scale with the business. This role is for engineers who have mastered ML and software craft at the senior level and are now ready to multiply their impact through technical leadership, mentorship of senior engineers, and architectural decisions that shape how the Data & ML organization builds and deploys ML systems. You will be the technical authority on ML for payments at PPRO—setting the direction others follow, raising the bar across the discipline, and driving alignment across engineering, product, and data teams.
Read the full posting ↓
Your impact in this role:
Define ML Technical Strategy: Drive the multi-quarter roadmap for ML-driven authorization optimization, routing intelligence, and retry strategies. Identify the highest-impact opportunities before they become obvious, and build the case for investment with data and business framing. Architect Foundational ML Systems: Design and lead the implementation of shared ML infrastructure—feature stores, model serving platforms, experimentation frameworks—that accelerates every team building on payments data, not just your own. Drive Cross-Team Technical Standards: Author and champion ML engineering standards across PPRO (model governance, monitoring, patterns), ensuring consistency, reliability, and reproducibility organization-wide. Solve Ambiguous, High-Stakes Problems: Take on challenges where the problem itself isn't well-defined. You scope, structure, and sequence the work—then lead execution across multiple engineers and teams to deliver. Mentor and Level Up Senior Engineers: Actively invest in the growth of Senior engineers: through design reviews, pairing on hard problems, sponsoring stretch opportunities, and raising expectations for what "production-ready ML" means at PPRO. Lead Experimentation at Scale: Design the experimentation strategy for live payment traffic—including multi-armed bandits, causal inference approaches, and traffic-splitting frameworks—ensuring sound statistical methodology across the team. Elevate Engineering Culture: Run design reviews, set expectations for technical documentation, and create the internal forums (guilds, working groups, RFCs) that help ML practitioners across teams learn from each other and align on standards.