Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Ads Content Understanding

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in California.

📋 Description

• Lead the entire machine learning lifecycle, which includes problem framing, data handling, modeling, evaluation, deployment, monitoring, and on-call responsibilities, while designing scalable ML pipelines and advocating for responsible AI (focusing on bias, safety, and explainability) for ACU’s production models and signals.

• Offer technical guidance and mentorship to Machine Learning Engineers (MLEs) and Software Engineers (SWEs) involved in ML projects within ACU, conducting design reviews, establishing technical standards, and enhancing the team’s modeling and systems capabilities.

• Create evaluation and quality monitoring systems for content understanding signals, utilizing state-of-the-art LM-judge methodologies.

• Promote operational excellence in ACU’s ML infrastructures by establishing Service Level Objectives (SLOs), alerting mechanisms, and dashboards for essential signals (such as coverage, latency, precision/recall, and cost).

• Develop and enhance content understanding functionalities for commercial conversations (including reviews, recommendations, comparisons, and Q&A; sentiment analysis and stance detection; product entities and categories) and implement them as reliable signals that drive contextual and shopping advertisements, auto-targeting, new formats, and insights products.

• Advocate for large language model (LLM) and contemporary ML best practices within ACU: determine the appropriate times for prompting, fine-tuning, or distillation; design evaluation and safety frameworks; and lead at least one significant distillation initiative to substitute external APIs with in-house models.

⛳️ Requirements

• A minimum of 5 years of relevant experience as a Machine Learning Engineer (MLE) in delivering production ML systems (including models, pipelines, and serving) at scale, preferably in large-scale content understanding fields or advertising.

• Proven senior-level technical leadership experience: has played a role in architecture decisions, technical standards, and design reviews within their immediate team.

• Excellent communication abilities, capable of articulating complex technical trade-offs to Product Managers (PMs), Data Scientists (DSs), and other engineering teams, especially in ambiguous, cross-team problem scenarios such as Seekers/Searchers monetization.

• Some experience in building and deploying NLP/Language models or content understanding models in production (such as classifiers, encoders, or sequence/session models) with demonstrable business impacts (for example, uplift in CTR/ROAS or safety enhancements). Experience with commercial or intent modeling is a significant advantage.

🏝️ Benefits

• Comprehensive Healthcare Benefits and Income Replacement Programs

• 401k with Employer Match

• Global Benefit programs that fit your lifestyle, encompassing workspace flexibility, professional development, and caregiving support

• Family Planning Support

• Gender-Affirming Care

• Mental Health & Coaching Benefits

• Flexible Vacation & Paid Volunteer Time Off

• Generous Paid Parental Leave