Principal ML Engineer: From Research to Production, Equity

MaC VC; California (MO); On-site; USD 175,000 - 250,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health benefits

401k match

Equity

Flexible PTO

Thrive Market office Playa Vista

Thrive Market membership

Job summary

Thrive Market is seeking a Principal Machine Learning Engineer to bridge hands-on MLOps with research thinking, spanning infrastructure to publication-grade experimentation. You’ll read cutting-edge papers, discuss architecture with the team, and translate model results into business impact for Thrive Market’s search and discovery.

This role covers the full cycle from research to production, with latitude to define how that work gets done, including designing systems, evaluating models, and

Qualifications

• 8+ years of ML engineering spanning MLOps and research with principal-level impact.
• Hands-on experience reading ML papers and running comparative training experiments.
• Experience building and operating ML infrastructure and pipelines (Redis cluster).
• Familiar with search and discovery systems and LLM-enhanced architectures.
• Able to drive architecture decisions cross-functionally.
• Experience presenting results and roadmaps to executives.

Responsibilities

• Build new ML systems from ground up and improve ML pipeline.
• Read/implement ML papers and run training experiments; shape long-term search vision.
• Stand up and manage infrastructure such as a Redis cluster.
• Influence architecture and statistical methodology with engineering teams.
• Shape Thrive Market's long-term search vision amid LLM changes.
• Present model results and roadmap with business impact.

Skills

MLOps

Research to Production

Cross-functional leadership

Model evaluation

Executive communication

Tools

Redis

Docker

Kubernetes

Job description

Thrive Market is seeking a Principal Machine Learning Engineer to bridge hands-on MLOps with research thinking, spanning infrastructure to publication-grade experimentation. You’ll read cutting-edge papers, discuss architecture with the team, and translate model results into business impact for Thrive Market’s search and discovery.

This role covers the full cycle from research to production, with latitude to define how that work gets done, including designing systems, evaluating models, and