Senior ML Engineer — Onboarding & Personalization

Discord; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 220,000 - 275,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, and vision insurance

401(k) plan

Paid time off

Paid parental leave

Job summary

Discord in San Francisco is seeking a Senior Machine Learning Engineer for the Engagement ML team in Growth. You will design and deploy 0→1 end-to-end ML solutions to help brand-new users discover servers, people, and content, turning first sessions into lasting connections.

You will build scalable recommendation systems, tackle cold-start personalization, and collaborate with cross-functional squads to roadmap Onboarding, emphasizing production ML, embeddings, and strong collaboration to drive

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience in Machine Learning, Data Science, or Applied Science.
• Experience shipping recommendation or personalization systems end to end.
• Hands-on experience building modern recommendation systems: retrieval and ranking pipelines, embedding-based retrieval (e.g. two-tower models), and deep learning models (e.g. transformers).
• Experience taking ML systems from ideation to production at scale, including feature pipelines, model serving, monitoring, and online experimentation.
• Strong product intuition and a passion for building 0→1 ML applications grounded in user feedback and real-world impact.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills, able to serve as the ML voice on a cross-functional squad and keep stakeholders aligned on trade-offs, priorities, and progress.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and scale the recommendation systems that connect new users to communities and content, from candidate generation and ranking through to online serving.
• Solve cold-start personalization for users with little or no history on Discord, turning the limited signals available into recommendations for servers, communities, and content.
• Build and deploy ML models that lift new-user retention, combining purpose-built approaches with shared foundations such as user and server embeddings.
• Collaborate cross-functionally to shape the Onboarding roadmap, balancing fast learning experiments with the long-term complexity and scalability of the systems behind them

Skills

Machine Learning

Python proficiency

Communication skills

Cross-functional collaboration

Ambiguity handling

Tools

PyTorch

JAX

TensorFlow

Job description

Discord in San Francisco is seeking a Senior Machine Learning Engineer for the Engagement ML team in Growth. You will design and deploy 0→1 end-to-end ML solutions to help brand-new users discover servers, people, and content, turning first sessions into lasting connections.

You will build scalable recommendation systems, tackle cold-start personalization, and collaborate with cross-functional squads to roadmap Onboarding, emphasizing production ML, embeddings, and strong collaboration to drive