Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Discovery Recommendations

Epic Games • Cary, NC

2d • $190,363 - $341,243

About The Position

Epic Games is hiring a Senior Machine Learning Engineer to build recommendation systems for Fortnite’s Discover experience. The role involves personalizing recommendations across a large, rapidly changing catalog of creator-built experiences, where new content is published daily and quality signals may be sparse. The engineer will work across candidate generation, content ranking, impression allocation, and real-time reranking, while helping shape the user representations and infrastructure that support discovery.

The position includes designing and implementing retrieval, ranking, and reranking models; building multi-stage recommendation and impression-allocation pipelines; and evaluating improvements through experimentation. The engineer will partner with analytics and content quality teams on ranking signals and make infrastructure decisions across batch, near-real-time, and streaming serving architectures.

Requirements

• At least 5 years of experience building production recommendation or ranking systems.
• Experience with deep learning for information retrieval and multi-stage recommendation pipelines, including candidate generation, scoring, and reranking.
• Ability to design and analyze A/B experiments, with awareness of biases inherent to recommendation systems.
• Strong Python engineering skills and experience with PyTorch and large-scale data processing frameworks; Spark is preferred.
• Comfort working in a cloud-based machine-learning environment.
• Experience with explore/exploit strategies, content cold-start, or counterfactual evaluation methods applied to recommendation.

Nice To Haves

• Experience in a user-generated-content, marketplace, or content-discovery context.
• Experience with content-understanding models, such as NLP, vision, or generative AI, used as ranking features.
• Familiarity with creator-economy dynamics and how recommendation design affects content quality and creator incentives.
• Experience with Epic’s stack: PyTorch (TorchRec, Transformers), Ray, Databricks, and AWS.
• Passion for video games and/or experience with gaming analytics.
• Spark experience.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement retrieval, ranking, and reranking models for creator content using deep learning approaches such as two-tower architectures, transformer-based sequence models, and embedding-based retrieval.
• Build user representation systems that power personalized discovery.
• Build and optimize multi-stage candidate generation and impression-allocation pipelines that balance relevance, diversity, and fair content exposure.
• Design and run A/B experiments, own holistic recommendation evaluation frameworks, and drive successful experiments through production deployment.
• Collaborate with analytics and content quality teams on ranking signals, including genre classification, creator credibility, and content quality metrics.
• Own machine-learning infrastructure decisions, weighing batch, near-real-time, and streaming serving architectures.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed