Senior Machine Learning - Search

GoTo Group; Singapore; Hybrid; SGD 90,000 - 120,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading digital ecosystem in Southeast Asia is looking for a Senior Machine Learning Engineer to enhance search and recommendation functionalities across their platforms. The ideal candidate will have advanced skills in algorithms, proven experience in building large-scale models, and a strong programming background. This role involves close collaboration with data science teams to drive significant business impact. Candidates should hold a master's degree and have a passion for applying innovative technologies. They promote a diverse and inclusive hybrid work culture.

Qualifications

• Hands-on experience building large-scale ranking or recommendation systems in consumer products.
• Demonstrated ability to innovate with new algorithms or tools.
• Experience integrating LLMs or LLVMs into search or recommendation pipelines.

Responsibilities

• Design and optimise retrieval pipelines to improve precision and recall.
• Build high-quality embeddings and relevance signals that capture user intent.
• Develop multi-task deep ranking models that integrate real-time signals.

Skills

Programming skills in Python, C++, or Java

Building large-scale ranking or recommendation systems

Familiarity with LLMs and/or LLVMs

Strong product intuition

Good communication skills in English

Education

Master’s degree or higher in Computer Science, Machine Learning, NLP, CV

Job description

About the Role

As a Senior Machine Learning Engineer – Search, you will play a pivotal role in shaping the intelligence behind GoFood and GoPay. You’ll design, build, and deploy cutting‑edge search, recommendation, and monetization models that power on‑demand and financial use cases across Indonesia. In your first six months, you’ll help launch foundational platform capabilities and partner closely with business‑facing data science teams to drive measurable business impact and elevate the user experience. If you’re passionate about applying advanced algorithms to solve real‑world problems at scale, this role is one of the highest‑leverage opportunities in the company.

What you will do

• Design and optimise hybrid lexical–semantic retrieval pipelines (e.g., BM25, dense vectors, HNSW/LSH, generative retrieval) to improve precision and recall across GoFood and GoPay surfaces.
• Build high‑quality embeddings and relevance signals that capture user intent, cuisine and dish semantics, geolocation, delivery constraints, price sensitivity, and promotions.
• Develop multi‑task deep ranking models that balance conversion, diversity, merchant quality, and long‑term user retention, integrating real‑time signals such as promotions, surge, and stock availability.
• Build personalised ranking layers and user behaviour models leveraging historical orders, preferences, and contextual features.
• Engineer recommendation algorithms using collaborative filtering, graph‑based methods, and sequence models for retrieval expansion (e.g., Q2Q2I, Q2I2I, U2I), including for cold‑start merchants and new dishes.
• Advance embedding quality for multi‑modal data (text, images, behavioural signals) and use LLMs to enhance structured knowledge (taxonomy tagging, dish attributes, dietary labels).
• Incorporate structured metadata, taxonomy signals, and knowledge‑graph features into retrieval and ranking pipelines to improve semantic understanding and consistency.

What you will need

• Master’s degree or higher in Computer Science, Machine Learning, NLP, CV, or a related field; strong programming skills in Python, C++, or Java.
• Hands‑on experience building large‑scale ranking or recommendation systems in consumer products (ecommerce, food delivery, rideshare, ads, streaming, social).
• Familiarity with LLMs and/or LLVMs. Experience integrating them into search or recommendation pipelines is a strong plus.
• Demonstrated ability to innovate with new algorithms or tools and drive measurable impact, especially making use of Large language Models (LLMs) and Large Language and Vision models (LLVMs) in search or recommendation modeling.
• Strong product intuition and ability to reason from user behavior data and traffic patterns.
• Good communication skills in English, both written and verbal.
• Self‑motivated, curious, and excited by the opportunity to build high‑impact systems quickly.

About the Team

We are a growing team of algorithm specialists and engineers based across China and Singapore. We build the core search and recommendation platform that powers a wide range of use cases across the GoTo ecosystem. Our team has a strong bias for action and a shared passion for deploying models that make a real difference—whether it’s improving ranking accuracy, scaling LLM‑enhanced retrieval, or personalising customer journeys. We believe algorithm development is a team sport. We work openly, challenge ideas with curiosity, and support each other in building systems that move the business forward.

About GoTo Group

GoTo Group is the largest digital ecosystem in Indonesia with its mission to “Empower Progress” by offering technological infrastructure and solutions for everyone to access and thrive in the digital economy. The GoTo ecosystem consists of on‑demand transportation services, food and grocery delivery, logistics and fulfillment, as well as financial and payment services through the Gojek and GoTo Financial platforms. It is the first platform in Southeast Asia that hosts these crucial cases in a single ecosystem, capturing the majority of Indonesia’s vast consumer household.

About Gojek

Gojek is Southeast Asia’s leading on‑demand platform and pioneer of the multi‑service ecosystem with over 2.5 million driver partners across the regions offering a wide range of services such as transportation, food delivery, logistics and more. With its mission to create impact at scale, Gojek is committed to resolving consumer problems and raising standards of living by connecting consumers to the best providers of goods and services in the market.

About GoTo Financial

GoTo Financial accelerates financial inclusion through its leading financial services and merchants solutions. Its consumer services include GoPay and GoPayLater and serve businesses of all sizes through Midtrans, Moka, GoBiz Plus, GoBiz, and Selly. With its trusted and inclusive ecosystem of products, GoTo Financial is open to new growth opportunities and aims to empower everyone to Make It Happen, Make It Together, Make It Last.

GoTo and its business units, including Gojek and GoToFinancial (\"GoTo\") only post job opportunities on our official channels on our respective company websites and on LinkedIn. GoTo is not liable for any job postings or job offers that did not originate from us. You should conduct your own due diligence to prevent being victims of any fake job scams, if they did not originate from GoTo's official recruitment channels.

We may use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support parts of the hiring process, such as reviewing applications, analyzing resumes, or assessing responses. These tools assist our recruitment team but do not replace human judgment. Final hiring decisions are ultimately made by humans. If you would like more information about how your data is processed, please contact us.

#LI-HYBRID