Senior Applied Scientist I, Recommendations Ranking

Etsy•New York, NY

2d•$164,000 - $246,000•Hybrid

About The Position

We are looking for a passionate and talented Applied Machine Learning Scientist to join our Recommendation Ranking team. Our team develops Machine Learning models to understand buyers, personalize, and rank recommendations across Etsy.com and the Etsy app. As an Applied Scientist, you will work closely with Software Engineers to improve the shopping experience for 90+ million buyers. We are looking for individuals who are product & technology driven, and are passionate about making ML innovations in areas such as: Ranking, Reinforcement Learning, LLM and Deep Learning! This is a full-time position reporting to the Engineering Manager.

Requirements

You have a successful track record of applying machine learning techniques in addressing real-world problems.
You have experience with / working in one of the following fields: deep learning, multi-modal learning, reinforcement learning etc.
You have hands-on experience in training, deploying, monitoring, debugging and iterating on production machine learning systems in search, recommendation, and/or ads systems.
You have production experience developing large-scale machine learning systems in Python, Scala, PyTorch, TensorFlow or similar languages.
You write understandable and testable code. You have the ability to write and manipulate data at a large scale and you have an eye towards maintainability.
An M.S. or Ph.D. degree in Computer Science or related engineering fields with at least two years of practical machine learning experience

Responsibilities

Work closely with software engineers, data scientists, product managers, and designers to set the future technical direction of Etsy’s recommendation system
Push the state of the art and apply the latest advances in ML to improve buyer and seller experiences on Etsy such as:
Build user models that allow us to better understand the unique interests, tastes, and shopping mission of Etsy’s buyers.
Develop models that target Etsy-specific problems, including but not limited to personalized ranking, multi-objective optimization, diversity constraints etc.
Design foresight and intent prediction models that anticipate future buyer needs, predict lifecycle transitions.
Improve feed reactivity and freshness, ensuring recommendations adapt quickly to user actions, emerging trends and seasonal shifts.
Prototype, optimize, and productionize large-scale ML models that help deliver key results
Conduct experiments (A/B testing etc.) to validate the effectiveness of ML models and pipelines