Staff ML Engineer — Ranking & Recommender Architect

Grubhub; New York (NY); Hybrid; USD 209,000 - 225,000; Full time

Job summary

Grubhub is seeking a Staff Machine Learning Engineer to lead the ML engine behind Discovery, including ranking, retrieval, and recommendations. This hands-on technical leadership role owns model architecture across connected areas and sets direction with product and platform partners.

You will mentor engineers, drive cross-team design decisions, and advance state-of-the-art information retrieval and recommender techniques in a high-velocity environment.

Qualifications

• MS/PhD in a quantitative discipline or equivalent experience.
• 6+ years building and shipping ML systems; 3+ years at senior scope.
• Deep experience in recommendation, ranking, or IR at scale.
• Production deep learning with TensorFlow or PyTorch on GPUs.
• Experience with LLMs and transformer architectures in latency-sensitive apps.
• Strong data engineering: PySpark, Hive/SQL, Python data stack.
• Comfort with experimentation, A/B tests, and guardrails.
• Cloud ML infra, deployment, monitoring, and observability.
• Technical leadership: mentoring and design reviews; communicate with execs.

Responsibilities

• Own the ranking and recommendation stack end-to-end, including retrieval and multi-objective ranking.
• Lead offline evaluation and online experimentation for trusted results.
• Bring state-of-the-art IR and recommender techniques into production systems.
• Raise engineering standards: evaluation scorecards, reproducible pipelines, observability.
• Partner with product, search engineering, ads, and data platform to shape roadmaps.
• Mentor engineers, participate in hiring, grow technical depth across teams.
• Translate technical trade-offs to business terms for stakeholders.

Skills

Recommendation systems

Information retrieval

Deep learning

DL frameworks

LLMs

Python stack

Experimentation

Cloud ML

Education

MS/PhD in quantitative field

6+ years ML systems

Tools

Spark

Hive/SQL

SageMaker

GPU training

Job description

Grubhub is seeking a Staff Machine Learning Engineer to lead the ML engine behind Discovery, including ranking, retrieval, and recommendations. This hands-on technical leadership role owns model architecture across connected areas and sets direction with product and platform partners.

You will mentor engineers, drive cross-team design decisions, and advance state-of-the-art information retrieval and recommender techniques in a high-velocity environment.