Senior Staff ML Engineer - Ranking & Recommendation Systems

Blue Apron; New York (NY); Hybrid; USD 240,000 - 250,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

401(k)

Medical/Dental/Vision

Job summary

Grubhub, now part of Wonder, is hiring a Senior Staff Machine Learning Engineer to own the ranking, retrieval, and recommendation stack end to end. You will lead model architecture across search ranking, homepage and topic recommendations, and multi-objective optimization, collaborating with product and platform teams.

You will mentor engineers, raise the bar on evaluations, and bring state-of-the-art research into production while balancing latency, cost, and business impact.

Qualifications

• MS/PhD in a quantitative discipline or equivalent experience.
• 8+ years building and shipping ML systems, including 3+ years at staff level.
• Deep experience in recommendation systems, ranking, or information retrieval at scale.
• Production deep learning in TensorFlow or PyTorch, including training, serving, and tuning on GPUs.
• Experience with Large Language Models and transformer architectures, including fine-tuning and embedding generation.
• Strong data engineering fundamentals: PySpark, Hive/SQL, Python data stack.
• Fluency with experimentation: designing A/B tests and guardrails.
• Cloud ML infrastructure experience (AWS/SageMaker or equivalent).
• Demonstrated technical leadership and mentoring.
• Ability to communicate metrics and trade-offs to technical/non-technical audiences.
• Keeps up with latest research and applies it to production.

Responsibilities

• Own the architecture of the ranking and recommendation stack end to end.
• Lead evolution of optimization objective from short-term to long-term diner value.
• Bring state-of-the-art IR and recommender research into production: LLMs, embeddings, real-time inference.
• Raise engineering and operational standards across teams: evaluation, pipelines, observability.
• Partner with Product, Search Eng, Ads, and Data Platform to shape roadmaps.
• Mentor senior/mid engineers and participate in hiring.
• Translate trade-offs to business terms for stakeholders; document rationale.
• Continuously analyze and improve performance of the system.

Skills

Deep learning frameworks (TF, PyTorch)

Recommendation systems

Large language models

Data engineering fundamentals (PySpark

Experimentation & A/B testing

Cloud ML infrastructure (AWS/SageMaker

Technical leadership

Communication with stakeholders

Education

MS/PhD in quantitative field

Tools

AWS/SageMaker

Job description

Grubhub, now part of Wonder, is hiring a Senior Staff Machine Learning Engineer to own the ranking, retrieval, and recommendation stack end to end. You will lead model architecture across search ranking, homepage and topic recommendations, and multi-objective optimization, collaborating with product and platform teams.

You will mentor engineers, raise the bar on evaluations, and bring state-of-the-art research into production while balancing latency, cost, and business impact.