Senior Machine Learning - Search

Gotogroup; Singapore; On-site; SGD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Gotogroup is seeking a Senior Machine Learning Engineer – Search to shape the intelligence behind GoFood and GoPay for Indonesia. You will design, build, and deploy hybrid lexical–semantic retrieval and ranking models powering on‑demand and financial use cases.

Within six months, launch foundational platform capabilities and collaborate with data science teams to drive measurable business impact and enhance user experience. Passion for real‑world, scalable algorithms is essential.

Qualifications

• Master's degree or higher in Computer Science, Machine Learning, NLP, CV, or related field.
• Hands-on experience building large-scale ranking or recommendation systems in consumer products.
• Familiarity with LLMs and/or LLVMs. Experience integrating them into search or recommendation pipelines is a plus.
• Demonstrated ability to innovate with new algorithms or tools and drive measurable impact, especially using LLMs/LLVMs.
• Strong product intuition and ability to reason from user behaviour data and traffic patterns.
• Good communication skills in English, both written and verbal.
• Self-motivated, curious, and excited to build high-impact systems quickly.

Responsibilities

• Design and optimise hybrid lexical–semantic retrieval pipelines to improve precision and recall.
• Develop high‑quality embeddings and relevance signals capturing user intent, cuisine and dish semantics, geolocation, and promotions.
• Build multi‑task deep ranking models balancing conversion, diversity, merchant quality, and retention with real‑time signals.
• Create personalised ranking layers and user behaviour models from orders and contextual features.
• Engineer collaboration-filtering and graph-based recommendation methods for retrieval expansion including cold-start scenarios.
• Advance embedding quality for multi‑modal data and use LLMs to enhance knowledge tagging and attributes.
• Incorporate taxonomy signals and knowledge-graph features into pipelines to improve semantic understanding.

Skills

Python

C++

Java

LLMs

LLVMs

English communication

Education

Master's degree

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.

Responsibilities

• 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.

Qualifications

• 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 behaviour 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.