Software Engineer, Machine Learning - Search Algorithm, Standalone Apps Team

Meta Careers; Menlo Park, Northern (CA, KY); Hybrid; USD 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Meta's Standalone Apps Team is hiring a staff-level ML engineer to own the search algorithm, including retrieval, ranking, and relevance. The role focuses on building systems for high-quality search in a new image-and-text community product, with opportunities to shape modeling and serving infrastructure from the ground up.

You will define quality metrics, drive experiments, and mentor engineers to raise modeling and evaluation rigor while partnering across product teams for impact and ownership.

Qualifications

• Experience applying machine learning to large-scale search or ranking problems.
• Strong background in information retrieval and ranking metrics.
• Proven ability to design experiments to measure model quality.

Responsibilities

• Own the modeling and systems direction for search — retrieval, ranking, query understanding, and relevance.
• Define search-quality metrics and the experimentation approach; drive measurable relevance gains.
• Build and scale the ML and serving systems search depends on.
• Set technical direction across teams; align search work with product strategy.
• Mentor ML and product engineers; raise the bar on modeling and evaluation rigor.

Skills

Machine Learning

Search algorithms

Tools

ML systems

Job description

# Software Engineer, Machine Learning - Search Algorithm, Standalone Apps TeamMenlo Park, CA Engineering+ 1 moreApply nowWe're Meta's Standalone Apps Team — we build new apps to reach new user scenarios and serve needs that aren't well met today. The project we're building right now is an image-and-text community where real people share first-hand experiences and recommendations — what to try, where to go, how to do something. It's where people come to get inspired and to make everyday decisions, learning from others who've actually been there. It's still early — a small team working 0→1.If you want high ownership, a short path from idea to ship, and the chance to shape a product from its first version, this is that kind of team.We're looking for a staff-level ML engineer to own the search algorithm — retrieval, ranking, and relevance — so people can find exactly what they're looking for.---## Software Engineer, Machine Learning - Search Algorithm, Standalone Apps Team Responsibilities* Own the modeling and systems direction for search — retrieval, ranking, query understanding, and relevance.* Define search-quality metrics and the experimentation approach; drive measurable relevance gains.* Build and scale the ML and serving systems search depends on.* Set technical direction across teams; align search work with product strategy.* Mentor ML and product engineers; raise the bar on modeling and evaluation rigor.