Machine Learning Engineer, Local Search & Marketplace

NewsBreak•Mountain View, CA

About The Position

NewsBreak is seeking a Machine Learning Engineer to develop intelligent systems for connecting consumers with local information, businesses, and services. This role involves working across search, recommendation, ranking, retrieval, user-intent understanding, personalization, and marketplace matching. The engineer will have the opportunity to take machine learning solutions from conception through production deployment and iteration, with the scope and level of the role adjusted based on the candidate's experience. The company is a fast-growing content intelligence platform with a significant user base and a commitment to innovation.

Requirements

Experience building machine learning, data mining, search, recommendation, ranking, NLP, or related systems through academic projects, internships, or industry work.
Strong programming skills in Python, Java, C++, or another relevant language.
Solid understanding of machine learning fundamentals, data structures, algorithms, and statistical analysis.
Experience with one or more of the following: Search, retrieval, or learning-to-rank; Recommendation or personalization; Query understanding, intent classification, or NLP; Embeddings, semantic search, or large language models; Matching, marketplace optimization, or dispatch.
Ability to work with large-scale or complex datasets and translate ambiguous problems into practical solutions.
Strong collaboration and communication skills.
Interest in building production systems that serve real users and deliver measurable product impact.

Nice To Haves

Experience deploying and maintaining machine learning models in production.
Experience with experimentation, including A/B testing, causal analysis, or marketplace experiments.
Familiarity with deep learning frameworks and ML infrastructure, such as PyTorch, TensorFlow, Spark, Kubernetes, or feature and model-serving platforms.
Experience building taxonomies, user-interest representations, knowledge graphs, or behavioral models.
Experience applying LLMs to search, recommendation, classification, or information retrieval.
Background in local search, local services, maps, commerce, marketplaces, delivery, mobility, or location-based products.
Experience at a consumer internet, search, recommendation, advertising, e-commerce, or marketplace company.

Responsibilities

Build and improve machine learning models for search, recommendation, ranking, retrieval, matching, and personalization.
Develop systems that understand user queries, behaviors, preferences, and context.
Apply embeddings, natural language processing, large language models, and modern retrieval techniques to connect consumer demand with relevant local content, businesses, or services.
Build and optimize end-to-end ML pipelines, from data preparation and model training to online serving and monitoring.
Partner with product, engineering, and data teams to define problems, identify opportunities, and translate business needs into scalable ML solutions.
Design and analyze online and offline experiments to measure model quality and product impact.
Improve key product outcomes such as relevance, engagement, conversion, retention, and marketplace efficiency.
Explore new ML and LLM techniques and bring them into production where they can deliver measurable value.