Remote Staff ML Engineer — Recommender Systems

Quora; United States; Remote; USD 220,000 - 321,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical/dental/vision coverage

Equity refreshers

Remote work reimbursement

Paid time off

Job summary

Quora is a remote-first company offering opportunities to contribute from virtually anywhere. This Staff Machine Learning Engineer role focuses on defining the future of Quora’s recommendation ecosystem, leading end-to-end ML efforts for feed ranking, and scaling surfaces like notifications and digests with AI-assisted development.

You will mentor engineers, own production ML systems, and collaborate across product, data science, and infrastructure to drive measurable improvements in engagement

Qualifications

• 6+ years of professional software development experience in machine learning.
• 4+ years of professional experience building and optimizing Home Feed recommendation systems for social media and user-generated content platforms.
• Deep knowledge of the full recommender stack: candidate generation, retrieval, ranking, re-ranking, embeddings, and multi-objective optimization.
• Deep understanding of mathematical foundations of machine learning algorithms.
• Experience leading large-scale ML projects end-to-end with measurable outcome.
• Availability for meetings and impromptu communication during coordination hours (Mon-Fri 9am-3pm PT).
• BS, MS, or PhD in Computer Science.

Responsibilities

• Set the technical direction for Quora’s home feed recommendation systems.
• Lead the highest-impact projects across the recommender stack, from candidate generation and retrieval to ranking, re-ranking, and multi-objective optimization.
• Drive measurable improvements in user engagement and content quality through well-designed online experiments.
• Take end-to-end ownership of ML systems, including data pipelines, candidate extraction, feature engineering, model training, and production integration.
• Identify new opportunities to apply machine learning to different parts of the Quora product.
• Partner with product, data science, and infrastructure teams to align on priorities and tradeoffs.
• Mentor engineers and lead by example, raising the bar for code quality, modeling rigor and AI assisted dev velocity.

Skills

ML fundamentals

Software development

Python

C++

Communication

Mentoring

Distributed systems

Education

BS/MS/PhD in Computer Science

Job description

Quora is a remote-first company offering opportunities to contribute from virtually anywhere. This Staff Machine Learning Engineer role focuses on defining the future of Quora’s recommendation ecosystem, leading end-to-end ML efforts for feed ranking, and scaling surfaces like notifications and digests with AI-assisted development.

You will mentor engineers, own production ML systems, and collaborate across product, data science, and infrastructure to drive measurable improvements in engagement