Staff ML Engineer, Search & Personalization Lead

Warner Bros. Discovery; Bellevue (WA); On-site; USD 182,000 - 339,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

Wellness program

Retirement savings plan

Paid holidays and vacation

Life and disability insurance

Job summary

Warner Bros. Discovery is seeking a Staff Machine Learning Engineer to lead model-driven search for HBO Max. You will own retrieval, ranking, personalization and experimentation, shaping the roadmap and guiding architecture decisions across a global content discovery system.

You will mentor teams, collaborate with product and data groups, and drive data-driven innovation to deliver scalable search experiences for millions of users across platforms.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of industry experience, with 4+ years as tech lead experience (preferred).
• Deep expertise in search and/or ranking algorithms (e.g., retrieval, LTR, semantic search, query understanding, entity recognition).
• Strong experience building large-scale ML systems in production.
• Proven ability to lead technical direction and influence across teams.
• Experience with online experimentation and metrics-driven development.
• Strong programming skills in Python (Java/Go a plus).
• Experience with distributed systems and cloud platforms (AWS/GCP/Azure).
• Solid understanding of data fundamentals (SQL, pipelines, feature stores).
• Excellent communication skills and ability to work cross-functionally.

Responsibilities

• Lead the design and development of large-scale model driven search algorithms including retrieval, ranking, and query understanding.
• Define and evolve the technical strategy for search, balancing relevance, latency, and scalability.
• Drive end-to-end ML systems: data pipelines, feature engineering, model training, experimentation, and serving.
• Partner with product, data, and infrastructure teams to shape and execute the search roadmap and user experience.
• Mentor engineers and data scientists and raise the bar on algorithm development, system design, ML and engineering practices.
• Identify and drive high-impact opportunities across search and personalization.
• Foster a culture of experimentation and data-driven innovation while advocating for the user.

Skills

Search algorithms

Large-scale ML systems

Technical leadership

Online experimentation

Python

Distributed systems

Cloud platforms

Data fundamentals

Communication

Tools

AWS

GCP

Azure

Job description

Warner Bros. Discovery is seeking a Staff Machine Learning Engineer to lead model-driven search for HBO Max. You will own retrieval, ranking, personalization and experimentation, shaping the roadmap and guiding architecture decisions across a global content discovery system.

You will mentor teams, collaborate with product and data groups, and drive data-driven innovation to deliver scalable search experiences for millions of users across platforms.