Staff Machine Learning Engineer

PayPal•San Jose, CA

3d•Hybrid

About The Position

As a Machine Learning Engineer on Venmo’s Data Science team, you’ll tackle high-impact challenges that shape how millions of people move and manage money with friends, family, and businesses. Our work spans personalization, retention, trust, discovery, and growth — from predicting churn before it happens to powering Venmo’s search and recommendations, to building smarter fraud and risk models. You’ll leverage Venmo’s unique social graph and financial ecosystem to design ML solutions that drive engagement, safety, and meaningful product experiences. You’ll be a senior technical leader and thought partner across Venmo—building production-scale ML solutions that serve millions of users and strengthen the core of our product experience, with a growing focus on agentic AI and its role in shaping the future of commerce. From developing models that personalize interactions to optimizing search and discovery, your work will directly shape the future of how people move money and connect through Venmo. You’ll collaborate closely with engineering, product, and operations teams—pushing the boundaries of what’s possible with ML and helping evolve the data science culture at Venmo.

Requirements

Advanced degree (M.S. or Ph.D.) in a quantitative field such as Computer Science, Machine Learning, Statistics, or Applied Mathematics.
8+ years of industry experience applying machine learning to real-world problems at scale, preferably in product or platform settings.
Strong proficiency in Python and experience with modern ML libraries (e.g., scikit-learn, TensorFlow, PyTorch, XGBoost).
Expertise in supervised and unsupervised learning; experience with NLP, ranking systems, or user behavior modeling is a plus.
Proficiency in SQL and experience working with large-scale data systems in cloud-based environments (e.g., BigQuery, Spark, Airflow).
Demonstrated success deploying ML models in production, including monitoring, retraining, and debugging.
Excellent problem-solving and communication skills, with the ability to translate complex technical ideas into actionable product insights.
A collaborative mindset with a passion for mentoring, experimentation, and continuous improvement.

Nice To Haves

Experience in social platforms, fintech, consumer apps, or payments ecosystems.
Familiarity with real-time ML model serving and streaming infrastructure.
Contributions to research publications or open-source ML projects.

Responsibilities

Design, build, and deploy production-grade machine learning models that power personalization, search, ranking, discovery, and other core product experiences.
Use machine learning to drive monetization and deliver user value—supporting initiatives such as pricing strategy, feature optimization, and behavioral targeting.
Partner with product managers, engineers, and designers to identify high-impact opportunities, frame problems as ML tasks, and define measurable success.
Lead the full lifecycle of model development—from data exploration and feature engineering to validation, deployment, and monitoring in production.
Conduct rigorous offline evaluations and design online experiments (e.g., A/B tests) to assess model impact and guide iteration.
Collaborate with data and platform engineering teams to ensure scalable infrastructure, low-latency serving, and long-term system maintainability.
Communicate technical insights and data-driven recommendations clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
Mentor junior scientists and contribute to the evolution of Venmo’s machine learning strategy, practices, and team culture.