Senior Data & Machine Learning Engineer

About the Role

Join an early-stage AI company building personalized advertising and recommendation technology. You will own the matching system end to end, from model development through real-time serving, helping shape a core product capability.

What You'll Do

• Build retrieval, ranking, and re-ranking systems to match ads with recipients.

• Develop embedding and vector-search infrastructure for real-time ad selection.

• Optimize ranking for click-through rate, advertiser return, publisher revenue, and subscriber relevance.

• Own the feature store and serving path, including offline training, online inference, and consistency between them.

• Apply large language models and foundation models to subscriber tagging, content understanding, and user modeling.

• Take initiatives from prototype to production, including online learning, feedback systems, ETL/ELT pipelines, and warehouse transformations.

• Create dashboards and scorecards to track system health and business and model performance.

• Work with company leadership and engineering to set priorities, and help scale the recommendation system and future ML team.

What We're Looking For

• Five or more years of relevant experience, including at least three years building recommendation, ranking, or advertising systems.

• Experience shipping production recommendation or matching systems across candidate generation, ranking, embedding-based retrieval, serving, and evaluation.

• Background building ad ranking, click-through or conversion prediction, or ad-matching models.

• Hands-on experience with embeddings and real-time vector search, such as FAISS, Milvus, Pinecone, pgvector, or similar tools.

• Strong SQL skills and experience building data pipelines and transformation layers with dbt or similar tools, plus Postgres or analytical databases.

• Ability to work independently in an early-stage environment; startup or team-building experience is beneficial.

• Must be authorized to work in the United States without visa sponsorship.

Compensation & Benefits

Base salary range: $200,000 to $300,000 annually. Visa sponsorship is not available.

Location

Hybrid work arrangement. Candidates should be based in the New York City area, or in a U.S. time zone near Eastern time and able to travel to New York City quarterly.