Staff ML Engineer, Recommendation Systems Lead

Nubank; Palo Alto (CA); Hybrid; USD 230,000 - 345,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Medical Insurance

Dental Insurance

Vision Insurance

Life Insurance

AD&D

Parental Leave

Learning platform

Language Learning

Mental Health Support

401K

Health Savings Account

FSA

Work-from-home Allowance

Relocation Assistance

Job summary

Nubank is seeking a Staff Machine Learning Engineer in Palo Alto to lead the technical direction of our recommendation systems. This is a hands-on senior individual contributor role focusing on retrieval, ranking, and multi-objective optimization pipelines with scalable, low-latency production systems.

You will mentor engineers, collaborate with applied scientists, and drive architecture decisions that shape the team’s long-term ML strategy, while operating in a hybrid work environment.

Qualifications

• A strong track record building and operating large-scale ML systems in production, ideally recommendation, ranking, or personalization systems.
• Experience building modern recommendation systems, e.g., learned embeddings, semantic IDs, sequence models over long user histories, and conversational recommendation systems.
• Deep experience with the full ML engineering lifecycle: training, deployment, monitoring, data consistency, experimentation, and governance.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals and fluency in Python and/or Scala, or equivalent languages.
• Real experience with the operational side of ML: on-call, incident response, debugging systems under load.
• A track record of technical leadership, whether that’s an official title or just being the person a team leans on for the hard calls.
• Comfort working with ambiguity and translating loose business goals into concrete technical priorities.
• Good communication skills. You’ll need to explain technical tradeoffs to both engineers and non-technical stakeholders.
• Experience with distributed systems, Spark, or similar large-scale data processing tools is a plus.

Responsibilities

• Setting technical direction for recommendation systems, including architecture decisions that other engineers will build on for years.
• Designing and building production ML systems for retrieval, ranking, and multi-objective optimization that operate at scale and under real latency constraints. You will be hands-on, regularly making coding contributions.
• Leading the most technically demanding projects on the team, from first design through production rollout.
• Partnering with applied scientists to move models from research into reliable, monitored production systems.
• Raising the technical bar for the team: reviewing designs, mentoring engineers, and pushing for better practices around testing, experimentation, monitoring, and system design.
• Working directly with stakeholder teams to understand their recommendation needs and translate them into shared, reusable infrastructure rather than one-off solutions.
• Identifying and fixing the structural issues that slow the team down, whether that’s tooling, process, or technical debt.

Job description

Nubank is seeking a Staff Machine Learning Engineer in Palo Alto to lead the technical direction of our recommendation systems. This is a hands-on senior individual contributor role focusing on retrieval, ranking, and multi-objective optimization pipelines with scalable, low-latency production systems.

You will mentor engineers, collaborate with applied scientists, and drive architecture decisions that shape the team’s long-term ML strategy, while operating in a hybrid work environment.