Staff ML Engineer, Search Ranking & Personalization

Snap Inc.; San Francisco, Northern (CA, KY); Hybrid; USD 195,000 - 343,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical coverage

Parental leave

Equity (RSUs)

Job summary

Snap Inc. is seeking a Staff Machine Learning Engineer to lead the development of next‑generation Search ranking systems. You will design, build, and improve ML models that determine relevance, quality, personalization, and utility of search results at scale.

You will own major ranking initiatives from problem definition through experimentation, launch, and iteration, and partner with product managers, data scientists, and engineers to define success metrics and long‑term roadmap.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in a relevant technical field or equivalent practical experience.
• 8+ years of post‑Bachelor’s ML experience; or Master’s +7+ years; or PhD +4+ years.
• Experience developing ML models for relevance ranking, personalization, and engagement optimization.
• Experience with large-scale data processing and ML infrastructure (Spark, Flink, Beam, TensorFlow, PyTorch, JAX).

Responsibilities

• Design and develop ML models for Search ranking (relevance, personalization, quality).
• Own major ranking initiatives from definition to launch and iteration.
• Develop ranking models using learning‑to‑rank, neural ranking, embeddings, and large‑scale feature engineering.
• Build ranking systems balancing relevance, user satisfaction, latency, and business goals.
• Collaborate with PMs, data scientists, and engineers to define success metrics and roadmap.
• Analyze user behavior and search logs to identify improvement opportunities.
• Design offline evaluation, online experiments, and monitoring frameworks.
• Improve feature pipelines, training infra, and model iteration velocity.
• Provide technical leadership and mentor engineers on ML ranking systems.
• Stay current with advances in search, recommender systems, LLM‑based ranking.

Skills

ML fundamentals

Python

C++

Java/Scala

Distributed ML

AB testing

Leadership

Education

Bachelor's degree or higher

Advanced degree preferred

Tools

TensorFlow

PyTorch

Spark

Flink

JAX

Beam

Job description

Snap Inc. is seeking a Staff Machine Learning Engineer to lead the development of next‑generation Search ranking systems. You will design, build, and improve ML models that determine relevance, quality, personalization, and utility of search results at scale.

You will own major ranking initiatives from problem definition through experimentation, launch, and iteration, and partner with product managers, data scientists, and engineers to define success metrics and long‑term roadmap.