Senior ML Engineer, Contextual Retrieval & Search (Nova)

Iterable; Denver (CO); On-site; USD 150,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

Iterable, Inc. is seeking a Senior Machine Learning Engineer for the Nova intelligence layer to lead context retrieval and search. You will build retrieval across data sources and develop semantic query understanding to ground responses in evidence.

You will own end-to-end from research to production, mentor others, and help shape the AI direction at Iterable as the team scales to support enterprise customers.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of hands-on MLE experience putting complex models into production at scale.
• Master's or PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, AI, or a related field.
• You keep up with the latest research and focus on applying it to shipping reliable changes that measurably improve the product experience.
• Deep IR expertise: lexical (BM25), dense (embeddings, ANN indexes), and hybrid retrieval, plus learning-to-rank.
• Production experience with search engines such as Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, or Vespa, including relevance tuning and reranking.
• Hands-on experience with RAG, query rewriting, reranking, and grounding techniques that reduce hallucination.
• Experience building agents on top of retrieval, such as multi-hop search or sufficiency checks.
• Strong evaluation practice: offline benchmarks, regression detection, A/B testing, and labeling pipelines.

Responsibilities

• Build retrieval across structured data and unstructured content for Nova’s context-aware responses.
• Develop semantic query understanding for agents, including intent classification and entity resolution.
• Create pipelines to extract entities, embeddings, summaries, and metadata from customer data and keep them fresh.
• Design and implement search subagents that decide what to retrieve and perform multi-hop searches.
• Measure quality with ranking metrics and human judgments; monitor impact on final responses.
• Mentor engineers and help shape the technical direction for Nova.

Skills

MLE experience

Research mindset

Information retrieval

Search engines

RAG techniques

Evaluation & A/B testing

Education

Master's or PhD in CS/ML

Tools

Elasticsearch/OpenSearch

Vespa

Job description

Iterable, Inc. is seeking a Senior Machine Learning Engineer for the Nova intelligence layer to lead context retrieval and search. You will build retrieval across data sources and develop semantic query understanding to ground responses in evidence.

You will own end-to-end from research to production, mentor others, and help shape the AI direction at Iterable as the team scales to support enterprise customers.