Staff Machine Learning Engineer (Recommendation Systems, Quora)

Quora; United States; Remote; USD 240,000 - 320,000; Full time

Job summary

Quora is seeking a Staff Machine Learning Engineer to define the technical future of its recommendation ecosystem. You will own the direction for feed ranking, lead high-impact modeling bets, and pioneer integration of LLMs to redefine understanding and ranking of content.

You will scale recommendation surfaces beyond the home feed, mentor engineers, and drive AI-assisted development to accelerate shipping velocity across the organization.

Qualifications

• 4+ years of professional experience building and optimizing Home Feed recommendation systems for social media and user-generated content platforms.
• Experience leading large-scale ML projects end-to-end with measurable outcomes.
• Deep knowledge of the full recommender stack: candidate generation, retrieval, ranking, re-ranking, embeddings, and multi-objective optimization.
• Publications at venues like RecSys, KDD, NeurIPS, or ICML.

Responsibilities

• Define the technical direction for Quora’s home feed recommendation systems.
• Lead the highest-impact projects across the recommender stack from candidate generation to multi-objective optimization.
• Drive measurable improvements in user engagement and content quality through online experiments.
• Take end-to-end ownership of ML systems, including data pipelines, feature engineering, model training, and production integration.

Skills

Machine learning

Recommender systems

Leadership

Python coding

Education

BS/MS/PhD in Computer Science

Tools

Python

C++

Job description

• At Quora, machine learning drives nearly every aspect of our product, and our lean, high-velocity engineering team tackles complex, high-impact challenges daily
• We thrive in a remote-first culture built on absolute autonomy, continuous learning, and bold experimentation
• We are looking for a Staff Machine Learning Engineer to define the technical future of Quora’s recommendation ecosystem
• In this role, you will own the technical direction for feed ranking and retrieval, lead our highest-impact modeling bets, and pioneer the integration of LLMs and generative models to redefine how we understand and rank content
• Yond the home feed, you will also scale recommendation surfaces like notifications and digest emails, while architecting the underlying tools and abstractions that empower our entire engineering organization
• This is a high-leverage, hands-on IC role with organization-wide scope. You will write production code, mentor rising talent, and actively shape how our team leverages AI-assisted development to accelerate our shipping velocity
• Set the technical direction for Quora’s home feed recommendation systems
• Lead the highest-impact projects across the recommender stack, from candidate generation and retrieval to ranking, re-ranking, and multi-objective optimization
• Drive measurable improvements in user engagement and content quality through well-designed online experiments
• Take end-to-end ownership of ML systems, including data pipelines, candidate extraction, feature engineering, model training, and production integration
• Identify new opportunities to apply machine learning to different parts of the Quora product
• Partner with product, data science, and infrastructure teams to align on priorities and tradeoffs
• Mentor engineers and lead by example, raising the bar for code quality, modeling rigor and AI assisted dev velocity

4+ years of professional experience building and optimizing Home Feed recommendation systems for social media and user-generated content platformsExperience leading large-scale ML projects end-to-end with measurable outcomeDeep knowledge of the full recommender stack: candidate generation, retrieval, ranking, re-ranking, embeddings, and multi-objective optimizationDeep understanding of mathematical foundations of machine learning algorithmsBS, MS, or PhD in Computer ScienceStrong communication and interpersonal skills6+ years of professional software development experience in machine learningBackground in notifications, email/digest recommendations, or growth and lifecycle modelingPublications at venues like RecSys, KDD, NeurIPS, or ICMLFlexible and positive team playerPassion for Quora’s mission and goalsHands-on experience deploying and running generative models at scale6+ years of experience writing Python or C++ code