Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Premium Discovery
About The Position
Scribd, Inc. is hiring a Senior Machine Learning Engineer to own recommendations for Fable and grow into the technical lead for Premium recommendations. The role is part of Premium’s Discovery squad, a dedicated team working on recommendations, search, applied research, and machine learning for Everand and Fable. The squad partners closely with Orion, Scribd’s machine learning platform team, which operates the feature store, model registry, embedding-based retrieval, and model serving used across Scribd products. The first major project is migrating Fable’s existing collaborative-filtering recommender to Orion so Fable and Everand can share a modern recommendation stack. The position spans data, features, model training and serving, experimentation, and production operations, while keeping current recommendations running during the migration. The engineer will bring Fable’s social signals into recommendations for both Fable and Everand, collaborate with product managers and analysts on experiments, and lead technical planning and delivery for Premium recommendations. The role works across Fable’s Google Cloud stack and Orion/Everand’s AWS stack. Technologies include Python, Go, gRPC, Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQL, BigQuery, Kubernetes, Vertex AI, Databricks, Spark, Airflow, AWS SageMaker, Weaviate, AWS infrastructure, Datadog, and Terraform. Scribd describes its work model as Scribd Flex, combining employee flexibility with intentional in-person moments; occasional in-person attendance is required regardless of location. The position is eligible for equity ownership and a comprehensive benefits package. The advertised salary ranges vary by geography: California $170,000–$265,000; United States outside California $140,000–$252,000; Canada CAD 179,000–237,500.
Requirements
- At least 5 years as a professional machine learning or software engineer, with a track record of shipping production ML systems.
- Hands-on experience building and operating production recommender systems, such as collaborative filtering or matrix factorization, two-tower or embedding retrieval, and learned ranking.
- Experience with large-scale data processing using Spark, Databricks, BigQuery, or similar tools.
- Experience with at least one major cloud platform (AWS or GCP), including deploying services on containers such as Kubernetes or ECS.
- Experience designing and analyzing online experiments.
- A record of leading projects that depend on other teams and working directly with product managers.
- Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, or equivalent professional experience.
Nice To Haves
- Google Cloud experience, especially Vertex AI and BigQuery.
- Experience migrating or replacing a production ML system while keeping it running.
- Experience with social or graph-based recommendations, such as user similarity, follows, or groups.
- Experience with search and semantic retrieval, such as Elasticsearch, Vertex AI Search, or vector databases.
- Experience working on consumer apps for reading, media, or social.
Responsibilities
- Lead the migration of Fable recommendations onto Orion across data, features, training, serving, and experiments while keeping existing recommendations running.
- Extend Orion’s rankers, feature store, and embedding-based retrieval to support Fable in partnership with the Orion ML platform team.
- Own the production health of Fable recommendation systems, including quality, latency, cost, and on-call.
- Incorporate Fable social signals, including shelves, ratings, reviews, book clubs, and reader similarity, into recommendations for Fable and Everand.
- Design and analyze A/B tests with product managers and analysts to decide what to ship.
- Act as technical lead for Premium recommendations.
- Shape the roadmap with product managers and deliver work that depends on other teams’ systems.
- Improve engineering practices in the squad through design reviews, code quality, and operational readiness.
Benefits
- Comprehensive health, dental, and vision coverage.
- Mental health support and disability coverage.
- Generous paid time off, including vacation, sick time, holidays, winter break, volunteer time, and sabbaticals.
- Paid parental leave and family support benefits.
- Retirement matching and employee equity.
- Learning and development programs and professional growth opportunities.
- Wellness and home office stipends.
- Complimentary access to the Scribd, Inc. suite of products.
- Enterprise access to leading AI tools.
- Competitive equity ownership.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
