Why You'll Love This Role: 

We're looking for an experienced ML Ops Engineer to join the ML/AI team at Newsela. This team works on projects ranging from classical Machine Learning to AI / Generative pipelines.  This is a hands-on role. You'll work closely with ML/AI, data and site reliability engineers to take models from prototype to production, build robust data pipelines, and keep our services running smoothly as we continue to scale.

What You'll Be Doing:

• Design and maintain CI/CD pipelines for ML model training, packaging, and deployment across our microservices.
• Manage containerized services on AWS ECS, optimizing for cost, latency, and availability.
• Automate infrastructure provisioning and service configuration with Terraform.
• Work to maintain and scale services that make use of third party LLM providers.
• Build and improve data pipelines that feed models from BigQuery, S3, and DynamoDB into training and inference workflows.
• Instrument services with observability tooling (Datadog, OpenTelemetry, Langfuse) and establish SLOs for model-serving endpoints.
• Collaborate with ML engineers to productionize new models using BentoML, FastAPI, and container-based serving.

About You:

• 2-3 years in ML Ops supporting ML/AI features, systems and workflows with 3-4 years prior experience in DevOps, CloudOps or SRE.
• Strong proficiency in Python.
• Hands-on experience with Docker containerization and container orchestration.
• Solid understanding of CI/CD for ML workflows in an enterprise production environment.
• Experience with Infrastructure as Code, preferably Terraform.
• Familiarity with cloud platforms — specifically AWS (ECS, ECR, S3, DynamoDB, CloudWatch) and GCP (BigQuery, Vertex AI).
• Experience with LLM integration and observability (OpenAI API, Google GenAI, Langfuse tracing).
• Experience building and maintaining data pipelines for ML training and feature engineering
• Familiarity with ML modeling workflows — training, evaluation, experiment tracking (e.g. MLFlow, Weights & Biases), and model versioning
• Experience monitoring and flagging model drift over time.
• Exposure to NLP/NLU models and frameworks such as Hugging Face Transformers, spaCy, or sentence-transformers
• Knowledge of vector databases (LanceDB, FAISS) and embedding-based retrieval systems
• Experience with scaling and maintaining deep learning frameworks (TensorFlow, PyTorch) in production settings
• Familiarity with classical ML libraries (scikit-learn, XGBoost, LightGBM) and model explainability tools (SHAP)
• Working knowledge of ML serving frameworks such as BentoML or similar.
• Comfort working with FastAPI or similar async Python web frameworks.

Please note that given the nature of the contract, this role will not be eligible to participate in company-sponsored benefits

About Newsela:

Newsela is a leading education technology company dedicated to meaningful classroom learning for every student. We deliver integrated, AI-powered solutions designed to unlock student engagement, empower teachers, and drive meaningful learning outcomes. Our suite of products supports knowledge and skill development, writing practice, daily instruction, assessment, and data-informed decision-making across K–12 classrooms. Grounded in learning science research, Newsela’s solutions integrate content, assessment, and analytics to help educators track progress, understand student outcomes, and deliver high-impact instruction that supports every learner.

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About Sezzle:

With a mission to financially empower the next generation, Sezzle is revolutionizing the shopping experience beyond payments, blending cutting-edge tech with seamless, interest-free installment plans that make shopping smarter and more accessible. We’re not just transforming payments; we’re redefining how people discover, interact with, and purchase the things they love while driving real impact on merchant sales through increased conversions and higher order values. As we continue to shape the future of fintech and retail, we’re building an innovative, dynamic team passionate about creating more than just a transaction but a truly unique shopping journey. If you’re excited about pushing boundaries in tech and delivering a game-changing experience for consumers and merchants alike, come join us at Sezzle and help create the future of shopping!

About the Role: 

We are seeking a talented and motivated Marketing Analyst- Comms who is best in class, with a high IQ and a high EQ. This role presents an exciting opportunity to thrive in a dynamic, fast-paced environment within a rapidly growing team, with strong prospects for continued growth and increased ownership.

The Marketing Analyst - Comms, will sit at the intersection of data, CRM strategy, and AI-driven efficiency. We’re looking for an execution-oriented person who owns their work from end-to-end. You'll dive into the details of how our campaigns operate across email, push, SMS, and in-app channels, spot friction and inefficiency, and design smarter ways forward. You'll spend most of your time inside Braze, Sezzle's primary consumer-focused CRM and marketing automation platform, building and analyzing campaigns across email, push, SMS, and in-app channels. You'll dig into performance data to identify what's working, surface gaps in our consumer journeys, and develop new comms to fill them. You'll also look for every opportunity to apply AI tools to make the team's output faster, sharper, and more scalable.
This isn't a role where you wait for assignments. We want someone who can look at a set of data, identify the opportunity, and start building toward it then communicate what  they found and why it matters to the team around them.

What You'll Do:

• CRM Campaign Execution & Analysis

  • Build, launch, and iterate on campaigns and canvases in Braze across email, push, SMS, and in-app channels.

  • Audit existing consumer journeys to identify engagement gaps, drop-off points, and missed messaging opportunities.

  • Develop segmentation strategies and personalized comms that improve activation, engagement, and retention.

  • Support A/B test design, execution, and readout — translating results into clear, actionable recommendations.

  • Maintain performance dashboards and reporting frameworks that make campaign data interpretable for the broader marketing team.

  • Track KPIs including DAU, ARPDAU, LTV per user, open rates, click rates, and conversion, and surface insights tied to those metrics.

  • Effectively manage our marketing CRM tool to drive new and innovative use cases that can be shared across the team

  • Write SQL queries to investigate issues and campaign results using internal data

  AI, Automation & Process Optimization

  • Identify opportunities to apply AI tools and automation across marketing workflows from copy generation to campaign QA to performance analysis.

  • Build and iterate on tools, templates, and agents that reduce manual effort and improve output consistency.

  • Stay current on emerging AI/automation capabilities and bring concrete recommendations for how they can be applied within Sezzle's marketing stack.

  Cross-Functional Collaboration

  • Partner with marketing, product, data, and engineering teams to align on tooling decisions and ensure smooth implementation.

  • Serve as a connector between technical teams and marketing stakeholders, translating requirements in both directions.

  • Facilitate adoption of new tools and workflows by developing documentation, training materials, and hands-on support for team members.

  • Identify and flag integration risks early; bring concrete mitigation recommendations.

What We Look for:

• Skills & Competencies

  • Hands-on experience building or implementing AI tools, agents, and automation in a professional setting.

  • Strong analytical skills, comfortable working with data, running queries, and presenting findings with context.

  • Experience in consumer marketing operations, CRM platforms (Braze or similar), or marketing technology stacks; Braze experience is a plus.

  • Ability to identify process inefficiencies and develop structured, scalable solutions.

  • Excellent written and verbal communication skills, and you can explain technical concepts clearly to non-technical teammates.

  • Basic project management skills; organized, proactive, and reliable with deadlines.

  • Experience with segmentation, A/B testing, and performance reporting.

  • Strong experience in data visualization tools and SQL.

  • Ability to prioritize and manage multiple tasks simultaneously 

  Educational & Professional Experience

  • Background in computer science, analytics, engineering, AI, and/or related fields.

  • Exposure to business, marketing, finance, or other related fields

  • Previous internships or academic projects involving campaign management, marketing analytics, and content creation preferred.

  • Professional, academic or personal projects that demonstrate an ability to creatively use AI to create efficiencies.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience building AI-first platforms or internal products from scratch, including early architectural decisions.

• Strong foundation in core machine learning and data science principles, including supervised/unsupervised learning, feature engineering, model evaluation, and statistical inference.

• Experience with transformer architectures (BERT, GPT, etc.) and understanding of attention mechanisms, tokenization, and fine-tuning strategies for domain-specific applications.

• Experience developing AI-assisted or agentic systems that interact with tools, data, or workflows.

• Familiarity with embeddings and vector representations, including text embeddings, similarity search, and integration with vector databases (Pinecone, Weaviate, pgvector, or similar).

• Experience with NLP techniques including text classification, named entity recognition, semantic search, and information extraction.

• Familiarity with cloud-native development using AWS.

• Understanding of prompt engineering, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and LLM application patterns.

• Experience with containerized systems and orchestration tools such as Docker and Kubernetes.

• Exposure to CI/CD pipelines and modern development workflows (e.g., GitLab).

• Experience with Golang is a plus (or willingness to learn).

• Experience with Braze or similar consumer facing CRM platforms and/or various B2C digital marketing channels like affiliate, CTV, paid social, paid search, GEO/SEO, DSP.

About You:

• You have relentlessly high standards - many people may think your standards are unreasonably high. You are continually raising the bar and driving those around you to deliver great results. You make sure that defects do not get sent down the line and that problems are fixed so they stay fixed.

• You’re not bound by convention - your success—and much of the fun—lies in developing new ways to do things

• You need action - speed matters in business. Many decisions and actions are reversible and do not need extensive study. We value calculated risk-taking.

• You earn trust - you listen attentively, speak candidly, and treat others respectfully.

What Makes Working at Sezzle Awesome:

At Sezzle, we are more than just brilliant engineers, passionate data enthusiasts, out-of-the-box thinkers, and determined innovators. We believe in surrounding ourselves with only the best and the brightest individuals. Our culture is not defined by a certain set of perks designed to give the illusion of the traditional startup culture, but rather, it is the visible example living in every employee that we hire. 

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