Senior Machine Learning Engineer
About The Position
As a Senior Machine Learning Engineer on Taboola’s R&D Team in Downtown Los Angeles, you will work on recommendation and ranking algorithms powering Realize, Taboola’s performance advertising platform, which serves more than 600 million daily active users. The models you build will influence campaign performance and revenue outcomes for advertisers worldwide. You will develop predictive customer behavior models for targeting and personalization, implement machine-learning or statistical algorithms for prediction and optimization, and deliver trained models to production. The role involves end-to-end ownership of models and related services, including design, development, deployment, measurement, and maintenance. You will also rapidly prototype and deliver projects using AI-assisted development workflows. As a Harness Engineer, you will create evaluation harnesses, automated testing frameworks, benchmarks, and guardrails to support safe, repeatable experimentation and deployment, following a test-driven development process. Additional work includes maintaining data pipelines and developing distributed data transformation and computation solutions using Hadoop, Spark, and other big-data systems. You will present findings clearly to product teams and technical leads and collaborate across teams, including early-morning or evening syncs with Taboola’s Tel Aviv team.
Requirements
- Bachelor’s or advanced degree in a relevant field; Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or Computational Economics are identified as ideal fields.
- At least 5 years of hands-on experience with Python and Java.
- Proficiency with machine-learning frameworks such as PyTorch or TensorFlow.
- Experience with recommendation systems, ranking algorithms, or personalization at scale.
- Experience taking end-to-end ownership of machine-learning systems, including designing, building, shipping, measuring, and maintaining them.
- Experience using AI-assisted development tools such as Cursor, Claude, or GitHub Copilot.
- Ability to communicate technical findings clearly and collaborate effectively across teams.
Nice To Haves
- Experience with Karpathy’s autoresearch (MIT), AutoML, or other agentic tools for machine-learning experiments.
Responsibilities
- Design and build predictive customer behavior models for targeting and personalization.
- Implement machine-learning or statistics-based algorithms for prediction and optimization, and deliver trained models to production.
- Own models and surrounding services end to end: design, build, ship, measure, and maintain them.
- Rapidly prototype and deliver complete projects or products using AI-assisted development workflows.
- Build evaluation harnesses, automated testing frameworks, benchmarks, and guardrails for ML systems, following a test-driven development process.
- Present findings clearly and actionably to product teams and technical team leads.
- Build and maintain code to populate HDFS and Hadoop with logs from Kafka or data loaded from production SQL systems.
- Design, build, and support data transformation, conversion, and computation algorithms on Hadoop, Spark, and other distributed big-data systems.
- Collaborate across teams, including participating in early-morning or evening syncs with the Tel Aviv team.
Benefits
- Health insurance
- Dental insurance
- Vision insurance
- 401(k) matching
- Fully stocked kitchen
- Parking
- Hybrid work schedule with three days in-office and the option to come in more often
- Discretionary bonus
- Equity
- Flexible PTO
- Paid parental leave
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
