Staff ML Engineer - Search & Reco - m/w/d

AVIV Group; Berlin; On-site; EUR 120,000 - 170,000; Full time

Job summary

AVIV Group is recruiting a Staff ML Engineer to own ranking and retrieval across its real estate platforms. You will design and ship models for search relevance and recommendations, with a focus on production‑grade systems and observable metrics.

You will set offline evaluation standards, run robust A/B tests, and drive the move toward LLM‑augmented search, while mentoring peers and collaborating closely with product to optimize for measurable outcomes.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of engineering experience.
• 3+ years shipping ML systems to production.
• Experience designing ranking/retrieval/recommendation systems.
• Experience diagnosing offline/online divergence.
• Strong fundamentals: production-quality code and reliable data pipelines.
• Track record of technical influence beyond your own output.
• Clear communication about uncertainty, including "we don't know yet."

Responsibilities

• Design, train, and ship models for search relevance, ranking, and recommendations, from candidate retrieval through re-ranking to production‑level deployment.
• Set the experimental standard: offline evaluation, well‑designed A/B tests, and the judgement to kill a win that can't be explained.
• Own the architecture of the systems you touch and ensure reproducibility and observability.
• Operate what you ship: serving, monitoring, SLOs, and a share of the on-call rotation.
• Lead the move toward LLM-augmented search — query understanding, semantic retrieval, and conversational surfaces.
• Mentor through design reviews and technical writing to make good decisions repeatable.
• Work with product on what to optimize for, and push back with evidence when a target is measurable but wrong.

Skills

Production ML

Ranking & Retrieval

Experiment design

Data pipelines

Mentoring

Clear communication

Job description

Staff ML Engineer — Search & Reco - m/w/d

Join one of the world's largest and most innovative digital real estate tech companies.

Staff ML Engineer — Search & Reco - m/w/d

Join one of the world's largest and most innovative digital real estate tech companies.

Backed by global investment leaders KKR and CPP Investments, AVIV Group is reshaping the way people across Europe buy, sell, rent, lease, and value real estate. With a strong presence in Europe, we power some of the region's most recognized digital real estate platforms across various countries – including Immoweb, SeLoger, and Meilleurs Agents (France's leading real estate valuation platform), alongside immowelt and Homeday (one of Germany's fastest-growing PropTech companies). Our European footprint is complemented by our dynamic tech and engineering hubs in Romania and Croatia. Our mission? We simplify life's most important transactions. By combining data, technology, and human expertise, we empower millions of people to find their perfect home! Help us shape the future of real estate.

Role Summary

You'll own ranking and retrieval problems across AVIV Group's real‑estate platforms — from query understanding to re‑ranking to production on‑call. Every model decision ships with an explanation, and you're one of the people the team turns to when a metric win can't be explained.

What You’ll Do

• Design, train, and ship models for search relevance, ranking, and recommendations, from candidate retrieval through re‑ranking to business‑rule layers.
• Set the experimental standard: offline evaluation that predicts online behavior, well‑designed A/B tests, and the judgment to kill a win that can't be explained.
• Own the architecture of the systems you touch — make build‑vs‑adopt calls, hold the line on reproducibility and observability.
• Operate what you ship: serving, monitoring, SLOs, and a share of the team's on‑call rotation.
• Lead the move toward LLM‑augmented search — query understanding, semantic retrieval, conversational surfaces — separating production‑ready work from demos.
• Mentor through design reviews and technical writing that make good decisions repeatable.
• Work directly with product on what to optimize for, and push back with evidence when a target is measurable but wrong.

What You Bring

• 8+ years of engineering experience, with at least 3 shipping ML systems to production at meaningful scale.
• Hands‑on experience designing ranking/retrieval/recommendation systems across the full funnel: candidate generation, feature engineering, model architecture, re‑ranking.
• Experience diagnosing offline/online divergence and changing a team's evaluation practice.
• Strong engineering fundamentals: production‑quality code, reliable data pipelines, reproducibility as a baseline.
• A track record of technical influence beyond your own output.
• Clear communication about uncertainty, including "we don't know yet."

Nice to have

• LLM‑based search features in production (semantic retrieval, embeddings at scale, RAG, query understanding) with evaluation to back the claims.
• Learning‑to‑rank, vector search, or candidate‑generation systems at high scale.
• Marketplace or classifieds domain background.
• Geospatial features in ranking.