Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Discovery Recommendations

Epic Games • Cary, NC

1d

About The Position

Epic Games is hiring a Senior Machine Learning Engineer to design, build, and optimize recommendation systems for Fortnite's Discover experience. The systems serve personalized recommendations across a large player base and a massive, rapidly changing catalog of creator-built experiences, where new content is published daily and quality signals may be sparse.

The role spans the recommendation stack, including candidate generation, content ranking, impression allocation, and real-time reranking. The engineer will build user representation systems and recommendation pipelines that balance relevance, diversity, and fair content exposure, while owning evaluation and experimentation through production deployment. The role also includes collaboration on ranking signals and decisions about batch, near-real-time, and streaming ML 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.
• Experience with PyTorch and large-scale data processing frameworks; Spark is preferred.
• Comfort working in a cloud-based ML environment.

Nice To Haves

• Experience in a user-generated-content, marketplace, or content-discovery context.
• Experience with explore/exploit strategies, content cold-start, or counterfactual evaluation methods applied to recommendation.
• Experience with content understanding models (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.

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 for 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 to validate model improvements.
• Own evaluation frameworks that measure recommendation quality holistically and drive improvements from experiment through production deployment.
• Collaborate with analytics and content quality teams on ranking signals, including genre classification, creator credibility, and content quality metrics.
• Own ML infrastructure decisions, including tradeoffs among batch, near-real-time, and streaming serving architectures.

Benefits

• Company pays 100% of premiums for employees and dependents for medically necessary coverage, including medical, dental, a Vision HRA, long-term disability, and life insurance.
• 401(k) with competitive match.
• Free therapy and coaching for employees and dependents through Modern Health.
• Company events and company-wide paid breaks.
• Unlimited PTO and sick time.
• Paid sabbatical after 7 years of employment.

What This Job Offers

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