Staff ML Scientist, Personalization & Recommender Systems

Penguin Random House; New York (NY); On-site; USD 210,000 - 250,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical/Prescription drug insurance

Dental

Vision

Health Care/FSA and HSA

401(k) with pre-tax and Roth

Disability Insurance

Life/AD&D Insurance

Commuter Benefits

Student Loan Repayment

Educational Assistance & generous paid

Paid time off

Job summary

Penguin Random House in New York seeks a Staff Machine Learning Scientist to lead personalization and recommender systems across websites, email programs, and online marketing. You will own end-to-end development, deployment, and monitoring, collaborating with stakeholders, platform engineers, and the broader personalization team.

The role requires a strong ML background, PhD or equivalent, and experience shipping scalable systems.

Qualifications

• PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Engineering, Operations Research, Statistics, or related field, OR Master's with 8+ years of applied ML experience.
• Deep expertise in recommender systems, personalization, ranking/retrieval, or computational advertising.
• Expert-level Python and ML frameworks (PyTorch or TensorFlow) and recommendation tooling (e.g., NVTabular, Merlin, Triton).
• Strong experience with cloud-based ML infrastructure (AWS, Kubernetes, Databricks), containerization (Docker), and model serving at low latency.
• Advanced SQL skills and experience architecting large-scale data pipelines and feature stores.
• Demonstrated ability to define technical roadmaps, influence direction across teams, and make architectural decisions that hold up over time.
• Excellent communication skills with the ability to present complex technical work to executive and non-technical audiences.
• Be cutting edge. Use the latest AI tools to develop well-designed and robust software.

Responsibilities

• Define and drive the technical roadmap for personalization and recommender systems, prioritizing roadmap items to meet business goals and defining short-term vision for the team.
• Propose and deliver R&D that directly shapes roadmaps, multiple projects, and long-term deliverables. Models are used over the long term by multiple products and teams.
• Design and lead the development of software used by multiple teams, ensuring long-term maintainability, scalability, and adaptability.
• Ensure complex, multi-service personalization products meet SLAs and provide correct results over time. Adapt systems to changing business needs and resolve multi-product, multi-team service incidents.
• Establish and enforce experimentation best practices, including A/B testing frameworks, offline evaluation methodology, and metrics design across personalization surfaces.
• Lead team meetings, ensure the team's progress on the roadmap, and make technical decisions that unblock projects.
• Manage stakeholders' expectations with data-driven narratives and communicate effectively with senior leadership to align on strategy and track progress.
• Drive organizational efficiency and business impact by implementing new technologies and processes. Foster a collaborative and high-performance team culture.
• Mentor senior and mid-level scientists, setting high code quality standards and best practices for the team.
• Stay current with advances in recommender systems, LLMs for personalization, and representation learning, bringing relevant advances into production when they deliver measurable improvement.

Job description

Penguin Random House in New York seeks a Staff Machine Learning Scientist to lead personalization and recommender systems across websites, email programs, and online marketing. You will own end-to-end development, deployment, and monitoring, collaborating with stakeholders, platform engineers, and the broader personalization team.

The role requires a strong ML background, PhD or equivalent, and experience shipping scalable systems.