Staff Forward Deployed Research Engineer – Ranking

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

📋 Description

• Implement production models: Collaborate directly within client environments to design, construct, and deploy production ranking and recommendation models that effectively enhance business conversion, engagement, and lifetime value.

• Produce technical deliverables: Develop comprehensive ranking pipelines, embedding generation schemas, nearest-neighbor retrieval systems, and low-latency model serving infrastructure.

• Provide exceptional partnership: Offer high-touch deployment assistance within large consumer enterprise settings, ensuring seamless integration with existing data ecosystems and business logic.

• Design data pipelines: Create and sustain production-grade, highly optimized data pipelines to process extensive datasets, guaranteeing that models receive continuous, reliable training and inference features.

• Systematize repeatable patterns: Recognize and modularize consistent deployment patterns across various industry sectors, contributing valuable insights back to Sequen's core product and engineering teams.

• Manage production lifecycles: Oversee the entire ML lifecycle from start to finish, including model monitoring, A/B testing frameworks, performance regression detection, and continuous retraining strategies.

• Explore research frontiers: Maintain a strong, active knowledge of the latest advancements in deep learning, including multi-stage retrieval, learning-to-rank, and large-scale personalization techniques.

• Identify organic growth opportunities: Cultivate strong relationships with client engineering teams and proactively discover new opportunities to implement ranking solutions that provide additional customer value.

• Advocate for Sequen's mission: Serve as a technical ambassador for Sequen AI's vision to influence end-user behavior for the largest consumer platforms in the world.

⛳️ Requirements

• Established experience: Bring over 7 years of experience as an ML Engineer, Applied Scientist, or Forward Deployed Engineer, with a strong emphasis on deep learning for search, recommendation, or retrieval systems.

• Expertise in model building: Hold deep proficiency in PyTorch, deep learning theory, and machine learning algorithms (specifically multi-stage scoring and embedding models).

• Data pipeline expertise: Showcase hands-on experience in designing and optimizing large-scale, distributed data pipelines using Spark, Airflow, and dbt within GCP and AWS environments.

• Cloud and infrastructure proficiency: Work comfortably with Kubernetes, Airflow, Terraform, and cloud platforms such as AWS and GCP to manage scalable model deployment and experimentation environments.

• Analytical problem-solving skills: Demonstrate excellence in addressing open-ended, highly complex systems challenges that require first-principles thinking.

• Strong ownership mindset: Take full accountability for driving customer outcomes from initial prototyping and training to live production inference.

🏝️ Benefits

• Highly competitive base salary ranging from $300,000 to $350,000 USD

• Meaningful early-employee equity

• Performance bonuses

• Comprehensive premium health benefits

• Unlimited paid time off

• Flexible hybrid/remote configurations

• Highly collaborative, world-class engineering culture