Staff ML Engineer - Recommender Systems (Remote)

OpenKrill; United States; Remote; USD 220,000 - 321,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical/dental/vision coverage

Equity refreshers

Remote work reimbursement

Paid time off

Employee assistance programs

Job summary

Quora is seeking a Staff Machine Learning Engineer to define the technical future of its recommendation ecosystem and own the home feed direction. You will lead modeling bets, integrate LLMs, and scale surfaces like notifications and digests while enabling the broader engineering org.

You will mentor engineers, ship production ML systems, and drive experiments that improve engagement and content quality in a remote-first, high-autonomy environment.

Qualifications

• 6+ years of professional software development experience in machine learning.
• 4+ years of experience building and optimizing Home Feed recommendation systems.
• Deep knowledge of the full recommender stack: candidate generation, retrieval, ranking, re-ranking, embeddings, and multi-objective optimization.
• Experience leading large-scale ML projects end-to-end with measurable outcomes.
• Strong communication and interpersonal skills.

Responsibilities

• 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 online experiments.
• Take end-to-end ownership of ML systems, including data pipelines, 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 and AI-assisted dev velocity.

Skills

Machine learning

Communication skills

Team collaboration

Education

BS/MS/PhD in Computer Science

Tools

Python

C++

Job description

Quora is seeking a Staff Machine Learning Engineer to define the technical future of its recommendation ecosystem and own the home feed direction. You will lead modeling bets, integrate LLMs, and scale surfaces like notifications and digests while enabling the broader engineering org.

You will mentor engineers, ship production ML systems, and drive experiments that improve engagement and content quality in a remote-first, high-autonomy environment.