Staff/Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Match Team

Enigma Technologies; Los Angeles (CA); On-site; Confidential; Full time

Job summary

Enigma Technologies is seeking a Senior/Staff Machine Learning Engineer for the Match Team in Los Angeles area. You will lead end-to-end ML and systems work to power fast, reliable search experiences at scale across data products.

You’ll design models, evaluation frameworks, and production-ready retrieval systems with a strong emphasis on latency and relevance. The role requires deep expertise in information retrieval, ranking, and distributed systems, plus hands-on experience deploying in cloud

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience across machine learning, software engineering, data science, or data-intensive product systems.
• Strong programming proficiency in Python and experience operating within cloud environments (AWS preferred).
• Production-level expertise in two or more of information retrieval, ranking systems, NLP/embedding models, or distributed systems.

Responsibilities

• Develop innovative solutions to complex problems in information retrieval, ranking, semantic search, query understanding, and recommendation systems.
• Build and optimize low-latency, high-throughput search APIs, indexing pipelines, and retrieval systems using Python, Typesense, and AWS.
• Evaluate and evolve our search technology stack, driving technical design decisions across indexing strategies, retrieval architecture, and system performance tradeoffs.
• Lead end-to-end work from research design through experimentation, productionization, and customer-facing delivery.
• Design evaluation frameworks for measuring relevance, precision/recall, ranking quality, and user engagement signals.
• Improve query understanding via techniques like embedding models, vector search, hybrid retrieval, and query rewriting.
• Detect and investigate anomalies in search performance, ranking behavior, and data freshness, tracing issues to root cause.
• Partner closely with Product, Engineering, and client stakeholders to improve search experience and discoverability.
• Mentor teammates and help raise the bar for experimentation rigor, system design, and operational excellence.

Skills

Python

AWS

Information retrieval

Ranking systems

NLP embeddings

Distributed systems

Communication

Education

Advanced degree in a quantitative discipline

Tools

Typesense

Elasticsearch/OpenSearch/FAISS

Python

AWS

Job description

The Opportunity

This is a critical and exciting time at Enigma. Our customers consistently tell us that our data products create tremendous value and are deeply aligned with their most important workflows. As demand grows, we have an urgent opportunity to improve both the intelligence of our data and the systems through which customers access it.

We are looking for an experienced Senior/Staff Machine Learning Engineer to join our Match Team and help shape the next generation of Enigma’s customer-facing data products.

In this role, you will combine advanced statistical and machine learning research with the engineering systems required to power fast, relevant, and reliable search experiences at scale. This is a uniquely high-impact role sitting at the intersection of information retrieval, ranking systems, semantic search, distributed systems, and customer data delivery.

The Role

At the core of Enigma’s product is our data, which makes both data science and delivery systems central to what we build.

As a Senior/Staff ML Engineer on the Match Team, you will lead efforts that improve the relevance, latency, and scalability of our customer-facing data products. You’ll work across the full lifecycle: framing retrieval and ranking problems, developing models and experimentation strategies, evaluating results using real-world signals, and implementing high-throughput search and retrieval systems.

This role is ideal for someone who is excited by both hard ranking/search problems and the systems challenges of turning those solutions into low-latency, production-grade retrieval systems.

What You'll Do

• Develop innovative solutions to complex problems in information retrieval, ranking, semantic search, query understanding, and recommendation systems
• Build and optimize low-latency, high-throughput search APIs, indexing pipelines, and retrieval systems using Python, Typesense, and AWS
• Evaluate and evolve our search technology stack, driving technical design decisions across indexing strategies, retrieval architecture, and system performance tradeoffs
• Lead end-to-end work from research design through experimentation, productionization, and customer-facing delivery
• Design evaluation frameworks for measuring relevance, precision/recall, ranking quality, and user engagement signals
• Improve query understanding via techniques like embedding models, vector search, hybrid retrieval, and query rewriting
• Detect and investigate anomalies in search performance, ranking behavior, and data freshness, tracing issues to root cause
• Partner closely with Product, Engineering, and client stakeholders to improve search experience and discoverability
• Mentor teammates and help raise the bar for experimentation rigor, system design, and operational excellence

What Makes This Role Exciting?

• Impact: At Enigma, data science and machine learning aren’t just used to make product decisions; they are the product. Your work will directly shape how customers find, explore, and trust our data.
• Technical Challenge: This role spans some of the hardest challenges in search relevance, large-scale retrieval systems, ranking models, APIs, and distributed systems. If you like a technical challenge, this role is for you.
• Ownership: You’ll have meaningful autonomy to shape both research direction and the production systems that power it, including having a strong voice in our tooling and vendor ecosystem.
• Customer Proximity: Your work will directly influence how sophisticated customers integrate Enigma data into critical workflows and decision‑making systems.

Our Ideal Candidate

• Brings 5+ years of experience across machine learning, software engineering, data science, or data‑intensive product systems
• Has strong programming proficiency in Python and experience operating within cloud environments (AWS preferred)
• Demonstrated applied, production‑level expertise in two or more of the following technical domains: information retrieval, ranking systems, NLP/embedding models, or distributed systems.
• Has experience designing, fine‑tuning, and operating high‑scale backend systems, APIs, or data delivery platforms
• Brings strong judgment in ambiguous environments where relevance signals and ground truth are noisy or implicit
• Effectively communicates technical concepts and tradeoffs to technical and non‑technical audiences
• Thrives in highly collaborative environments with strong ownership and fast iteration cycles
• Has an advanced degree in a quantitative discipline or equivalent deep industry experience

Bonus Points If You

• Have deep experience with our core stack (Typesense, Python, AWS) or similar retrieval infrastructure (Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, FAISS)
• Have built customer‑facing search or recommendation systems or APIs
• Have worked on query understanding, embeddings, LLM‑powered retrieval, or hybrid search systems
• Have mentored senior engineers or data scientists and raised the technical bar across disciplines

About Us

At Enigma, we’re building the single, most reliable source of data on businesses to power the future of financial services. By engineering better data from hundreds of public and third‑party sources, we aim to tell the complete story of every business, so that companies of every size can access the financial services they need to grow and thrive. Our core values – generosity, curiosity, ingenuity, & drive – guide everything we do, from how we make our most important product decisions to how we work with and support one another on a daily basis. We’re a team of curious, driven individuals with diverse backgrounds and skills, but we’re all passionate about engineering deeper understanding through data—together. If this resonates, we would love to hear from you!

We are proud to be an equal opportunity workplace and an affirmative action employer. We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity or Veteran status.

Salary Range: $180,000-$295,000

A note on salary ranges: we pride ourselves on paying competitively for our size and industry. Salary is one piece of a total Enigma compensation package that includes additional benefits and opportunities. All of our compensation packages include equity because we believe 100% of Enigma employees should have the option to purchase ownership in the company and benefit from the value we’re creating together.