Senior Staff ML Engineer: Ranking & Recommendations

Grubhub Holdings Inc.; New York (NY); On-site; USD 240,000 - 250,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

401(k)

Medical, dental, vision plans

Paid time off

Parental leave

Discounted meals

Job summary

Grubhub is seeking a Senior Staff Machine Learning Engineer to lead the ML engine behind Discovery, including ranking, recommendations, and retrieval. You will own model architecture across search ranking, homepage recommendations, retrieval, and query understanding, collaborating with product managers and platform partners.

This hands-on leadership role requires guiding multiple teams, mentoring engineers, and shaping technical direction while improving end-to-end system performance and

Qualifications

• MS/PhD in a quantitative field (Computer Science, Math, Physics, Engineering, Statistics or related).
• 8+ years building and shipping ML systems, including 3+ years operating at staff-level scope across multiple teams or systems.
• Deep experience in recommendation systems, ranking, or information retrieval at scale with production constraints.
• Proven track record with production deep learning in TensorFlow or PyTorch, including training, serving, and tuning runtime models on GPUs.
• Experience with Large Language Models and transformer architectures (fine-tuning, embeddings, latency-aware deployment).
• Strong data engineering fundamentals (PySpark, Hive/SQL, Python data stack).
• Comfort with cloud ML infrastructure and production monitoring/observability.

Responsibilities

• Own architecture of ranking and recommendation stack end to end (retrieval, multi-objective ranking, calibration).
• Lead cross-team design decisions and mentor engineers across teams.
• Translate technical trade-offs for product and executive stakeholders.
• Drive design reviews and improve performance and reliability of models and data pipelines.

Skills

Machine learning systems

Leadership (staff-level)

Information retrieval

Experimentation & A/B testing

Model evaluation & monitoring

Education

MS/PhD in a quantitative field

Tools

TensorFlow

PyTorch

Spark / PySpark

SQL / Hive

SageMaker / cloud ML infra

Job description

Grubhub is seeking a Senior Staff Machine Learning Engineer to lead the ML engine behind Discovery, including ranking, recommendations, and retrieval. You will own model architecture across search ranking, homepage recommendations, retrieval, and query understanding, collaborating with product managers and platform partners.

This hands-on leadership role requires guiding multiple teams, mentoring engineers, and shaping technical direction while improving end-to-end system performance and