ML Scientist, Personalization & GenAI for Reader Discovery

The Washington Post; Washington (District of Columbia); On-site; USD 109,000 - 181,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical coverage

Dental coverage

Vision coverage

Pension and 401(k) match

Paid vacation

Paid sick leave

Holidays

Job summary

The Washington Post is seeking an Applied Machine Learning Scientist 2 to build AI/ML systems that help readers discover, understand, and engage with journalism. This role focuses on personalization, recommendations, ranking, user modeling, experimentation, and GenAI-powered discovery experiences.

You will work with scientists, engineers, data teams, product managers, editors, and other stakeholders to turn large-scale behavioral, content, and interaction data into intelligent reader experiences.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Mathematics, Statistics, Machine Learning, or a related field.
• 2+ years of experience in applied machine learning, AI, data science, recommender systems, NLP, or related field.
• 2+ years of professional Python experience and at least one ML framework (PyTorch, TensorFlow, or JAX).
• Experience with large-scale datasets and real-world ML problems.
• Strong foundation in ML, statistical analysis, model evaluation, and experimental design.
• Experience with ranking, recommendation, personalization, NLP, or GenAI applications.

Responsibilities

• Design, train, evaluate, and deploy ML models for personalization, recommendation, ranking, user modeling, and content discovery.
• Build and improve systems for For You, homepage ranking, article recommendations, related content, and real-time user modeling.
• Apply modern ML techniques (embedding generation, transformers, two-tower models, learning-to-rank, GenAI) for content personalization and recommendations.
• Support AI-powered reader experiences such as content understanding, question answering, intelligent discovery, and personalized content recommendations.
• Work across the ML lifecycle from problem definition to deployment, monitoring, and iteration.
• Conduct offline and online evaluations with ranking metrics, recommender metrics, A/B testing, and causal analysis.
• Analyze large-scale behavioral, content, and interaction data to generate insights and improve models.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to deliver scalable, reliable AI/ML solutions.
• Communicate model approaches, evaluation results, tradeoffs, and impact to technical and non-technical partners.
• Stay current with advances in ML, GenAI, NLP, recommender systems, and experimentation.

Skills

Bachelor’s degree in CS/Math/Stats/ML

2+ years in applied ML

Python and ML frameworks (PyTorch, TF,

Education

Bachelor’s degree in CS/Math/Stats/ML or related

Master’s degree preferred

Tools

PyTorch

TensorFlow

JAX

AWS

GCP

BigQuery

Spark

Beam

Job description

The Washington Post is seeking an Applied Machine Learning Scientist 2 to build AI/ML systems that help readers discover, understand, and engage with journalism. This role focuses on personalization, recommendations, ranking, user modeling, experimentation, and GenAI-powered discovery experiences.

You will work with scientists, engineers, data teams, product managers, editors, and other stakeholders to turn large-scale behavioral, content, and interaction data into intelligent reader experiences.