Sr ML Engineer: Agentic Context Retrieval & Search

Iterable, Inc.; United States; Remote; USD 150,000 - 200,000; Full time

Job summary

Iterable, Inc. is seeking a Senior Machine Learning Engineer to lead the development of Nova's retrieval and search stack for enterprise-scale customer engagement.

You will own end-to-end capabilities from research and experimentation to production systems, with autonomy to shape AI directions and deliver grounded, context-aware responses for large-scale deployments. You'll mentor engineers, collaborate with product teams, and contribute to evaluating models with offline benchmarks and live

Qualifications

• 5+ years hands-on MLE experience in production at scale, including search, information retrieval, or recommender systems.
• Master's or PhD in CS/ML or a related field.
• Stay current with research and apply it to improve product experiences.
• Deep IR expertise: lexical, dense, and hybrid retrieval; learning-to-rank.
• Production experience with search engines (Elasticsearch/OpenSearch/Vespa) and relevance tuning.
• Experience with RAG, query rewriting, reranking, grounding techniques.
• Experience building agents on retrieval, including multi-hop search or sufficiency checks.
• Strong evaluation: offline benchmarks, AB testing, labeling pipelines.

Responsibilities

• Build retrieval across structured data and unstructured content with source-specific signals.
• Develop semantic query understanding for agents: rewriting, decomposition, intent classification.
• Create pipelines to extract entities, embeddings, summaries, and metadata; keep them fresh.
• Build search subagents to decide what to retrieve, run multi-hop searches, and flag failures.
• Measure quality with ranking metrics, LLM judges, and online tests; improve retrieval and harness.
• Mentor engineers and help set Nova's technical direction.

Skills

Machine learning engineering

Production deployment

Information retrieval

Search systems

Recommendation systems

NLP/IR research

Education

Masters/PhD in CS/ML

Tools

Elasticsearch

OpenSearch

Vespa

RAG pipelines

Job description

Iterable, Inc. is seeking a Senior Machine Learning Engineer to lead the development of Nova's retrieval and search stack for enterprise-scale customer engagement.

You will own end-to-end capabilities from research and experimentation to production systems, with autonomy to shape AI directions and deliver grounded, context-aware responses for large-scale deployments. You'll mentor engineers, collaborate with product teams, and contribute to evaluating models with offline benchmarks and live