Hi @josh, thanks for helping 
The forum says I can’t attach anything since I’m a new user but I’ll link the minimum non-working py file as a GitHub gist here. It’s basically just a parameterized RY gate on a single wire quantum circuit that feeds the expectation value into a single neuron neural network.
After trying the first suggestion, it does still return None when calling the gradient but I’m going to experiment with it more now. Thanks for the suggestion!