Staff+ Research Engineer — Search & Recs

Sequen AI; United States; Hybrid; USD 300,000 - 350,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Premium health benefits

Equity participation

Performance bonuses

Unlimited PTO

Job summary

Sequen AI is seeking a Staff+ Forward Deployed Research Engineer to design, develop, and scale ranking, embedding, and retrieval systems powering our personalized discovery platform.

You will work directly within customer environments, owning end-to-end ML lifecycles from prototyping to live inference, translating user behavior data into measurable revenue lift for enterprise clients. This is a hands-on, fast-paced role requiring collaboration across customers and Sequen’s engineering teams.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of experience as an ML Engineer, Applied Scientist, or Forward Deployed Engineer with a heavy focus on deep learning for search, recommendation, or retrieval systems.
• Possess deep proficiency in PyTorch and ML algorithms (multi-stage scoring and embedding models).
• Hands-on experience designing and optimizing large-scale distributed data pipelines using Spark, Airflow, and dbt across GCP and AWS environments.
• Comfortable with Kubernetes, Airflow, Terraform, and cloud platforms like AWS and GCP to manage scalable deployment and experimentation environments.

Responsibilities

• Deploy production ranking and recommendation models inside customer environments to optimize for business metrics.
• Engineer end-to-end ranking pipelines, embedding generation schemas, and low-latency model serving infrastructure.
• Provide high-touch deployment support in enterprise environments, ensuring seamless data ecosystem integration.
• Architect production-grade data pipelines to feed training and inference with fresh features.
• Modularize repeatable deployment patterns and share insights with Sequen’s product and engineering teams.
• Own the ML lifecycle end-to-end including monitoring, A/B testing, and retraining strategies.
• Stay at the cutting edge of deep learning advances, multi-stage retrieval, and learning-to-rank techniques.
• Identify new opportunities to deploy ranking solutions within client environments.

Skills

PyTorch

Deep learning

Search & recommendation

Multi-stage ranking

Embedding models

Data pipelines

Analytical thinking

Ownership mindset

Tools

Spark

Airflow

dbt

Kubernetes

Terraform

AWS

GCP

Job description

Sequen AI is seeking a Staff+ Forward Deployed Research Engineer to design, develop, and scale ranking, embedding, and retrieval systems powering our personalized discovery platform.

You will work directly within customer environments, owning end-to-end ML lifecycles from prototyping to live inference, translating user behavior data into measurable revenue lift for enterprise clients. This is a hands-on, fast-paced role requiring collaboration across customers and Sequen’s engineering teams.