Senior ML Engineer, Nova: Context Retrieval & Search

Iterable, Inc.; Atlanta (GA); Remote; USD 150,000 - 250,000; Full time

Job summary

Iterable, the AI customer engagement platform, seeks a Senior Machine Learning Engineer for its Nova intelligence layer. You will lead retrieval and search to ground agent responses in customer context, and you will shape the retrieval stack and its subagents.

You will own research-to-production work, deploying reliable models at scale, and influence the future direction of AI at Iterable. Expect mentoring responsibilities and cross-team collaboration.

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.
• 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.

Responsibilities

• Build retrieval across structured data (tables, SQL, dashboards, code) and unstructured content (docs, tickets, chat, media).
• Build semantic query understanding for agents: query rewriting, decomposition, intent classification, and entity resolution for multi-turn workflows.
• Build pipelines that extract entities, embeddings, summaries, and metadata from customer data, and keep them fresh.
• Build search subagents that decide what to retrieve, run multi-hop searches, check results, and flag retrieval failures.
• Measure quality with ranking metrics (nDCG, MRR, Recall@K) and online tests to drive improvements.
• Mentor engineers on the team and help set the technical direction for Nova.

Skills

Hands-on MLE

Production experience

Information retrieval

Search systems

NLP / LLM

Evaluation & A/B testing

Education

Master's or PhD in CS/ML

Tools

Elasticsearch/OpenSearch/Vespa

RAG / retrieval pipelines

Job description

Iterable, the AI customer engagement platform, seeks a Senior Machine Learning Engineer for its Nova intelligence layer. You will lead retrieval and search to ground agent responses in customer context, and you will shape the retrieval stack and its subagents.

You will own research-to-production work, deploying reliable models at scale, and influence the future direction of AI at Iterable. Expect mentoring responsibilities and cross-team collaboration.