Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Recommendation Systems

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

📋 Description

• Establish the technical vision for Quora’s home feed recommendation systems.

• Oversee high-impact initiatives across the recommender framework, spanning candidate generation and retrieval to ranking, re-ranking, and multi-objective optimization.

• Enhance user engagement and content quality through data-driven online experiments.

• Manage machine learning systems from start to finish, including data pipelines, candidate extraction, feature engineering, model training, and production integration.

• Discover opportunities to implement machine learning throughout the Quora platform.

• Collaborate with product, data science, and infrastructure teams regarding priorities and trade-offs.

• Guide engineers and elevate standards for code quality, modeling rigor, and AI-assisted development efficiency.

• Produce production-quality code as a high-impact individual contributor.

• Influence how the team utilizes AI-assisted development to enhance shipping speed.

• Contribute to the Quora product, particularly in recommendation features like notifications and digest emails.

⛳️ Requirements

• Must be available for meetings and spontaneous communication during Quora’s coordination hours, Monday–Friday, 9am–3pm Pacific Time.

• A minimum of 6 years of professional software development experience in machine learning.

• At least 4 years of professional experience in developing and optimizing Home Feed recommendation systems for social media and user-generated content platforms.

• Extensive knowledge of candidate generation, retrieval, ranking, re-ranking, embeddings, and multi-objective optimization.

• Profound understanding of the mathematical principles underlying machine learning algorithms.

• Proven experience in leading large-scale machine learning projects from conception to completion with quantifiable results.

• Excellent communication and interpersonal skills.

• A Bachelor’s, Master’s, or PhD in Computer Science.

• Preferred: Over 6 years of experience in writing Python or C++ code.

• Preferred: Practical experience in deploying and managing generative models at scale.

• Preferred: Background in notifications, email/digest recommendations, or growth and lifecycle modeling.

• Preferred: A flexible and positive team player.

• Preferred: Publications in reputable venues such as RecSys, KDD, NeurIPS, or ICML.

• Preferred: A strong passion for Quora’s mission and objectives.

• Required to complete identity verification and a thorough background check before onboarding.

🏝️ Benefits

• Medical, dental, and vision insurance.

• Equity refreshers.

• Remote work reimbursement.

• Paid time off.

• Employee assistance programs.

• Flexible equity program in countries eligible for equity, allowing a portion of equity compensation to be taken as cash.

• Benefits may vary based on country.

• Identity verification and comprehensive background check required prior to onboarding.