Head of Machine Learning San Francisco Office

Hightouch; San Francisco (CA); Remote; USD 230,000 - 400,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Meaningful equity

Job summary

Hightouch is seeking an engineering lead to spearhead machine learning efforts across the company, guiding teams as a technical voice and people manager. You’ll focus on significant feature development, reliability, and scalable ML infrastructure in a remote-first environment.

The role emphasizes output over tenure, with a strong focus on impact, team growth, and delivering intelligent messaging, personalization, and content generation at scale.

Responsibilities

• Lead the team in roadmapping and executing significant features and products while upholding a high technical bar.
• Improve the pace of execution through leadership and technical expertise.
• Grow the team by identifying needs, deciding how to evaluate candidates, and ensuring high-impact hires.
• Raise reliability and incident management hygiene to reduce customer-facing incidents in a high-growth environment.
• Foster growth and engagement of team members to maintain motivation and retention.
• Tackle personalization and product recommendation challenges to deliver relevant content for each user.
• Advance probabilistic identity resolution to stitch disparate datasets and profiles.

Job description

About the Role

We are looking for an engineering leaderto lead machine learning efforts across Hightouch. While hundreds of companies use Hightouch today to sync data into their SaaS systems to automate and improve operations, there’s a lot of surface area we haven’t touched in helping companies figuring out which customers to message, what content to put in messages, and when to send messages. A lot of this work today is done manually through intuition and guesswork, and we believe that adding machine learning could have a step function impact for our customers. And given our access to data warehouses and databases, Hightouch is perfectly placed to make use of a company’s customer data in building a powerful intelligence layer.

At Hightouch, our engineering leaders serve as both active technical voices and strong people managers. The key outcomes we are looking for from this role include:

• Product Development: Lead the team in roadmapping and executing successful development of significant features and products as required to drive the business forward. Uphold a high technical bar, while making pragmatic tradeoffs

• Pace: Through a combination of leadership and technical expertise, improve the pace of execution of the team

• Recruiting: Be responsible for growing the team, including identifying needs, deciding how to evaluate candidates, and ensuring we hire high impact team members

• Reliability: Against the uphill battle of high growth/scale, up-level the team on reliability, resulting in fewer incidents, catching our own issues before our customers do, and a strong incident management hygiene

• People: Foster growth of team members and ensure strong engagement and motivation

Some of the problems we’ll be working on include:

• Personalization and Product Recommendation: There are often many options for what content a company could message a user with, including which products to show from catalogues. Given this large state space, how can Hightouch help personalize messages with the most relevant content for each user?

• Probabilistic Identity Resolution:Many of our customers have multiple datasets and sources of information on their users. How do we stitch these datasets together and decide which profiles are from the same user or household?

• Content Generation: Particularly with recent advances in LLMs, how can we help marketers generate text, images, and creatives that are compelling to their customers?

• ML Infrastructure: Building the infrastructure to support model training and inference at scale for some of the largest companies in the world.

What We Offer

We are looking for talented, intellectually curious, and motivated individuals who are interested in tackling the problems above. This is a senior role, but we focus on impact and potential for growth more than years of experience. The salary range for this position is $230,000 - $400,000 USD per year, which is location independent in accordance with our remote-first policy. We also offer meaningful equity compensation.