Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Recommendation Systems - Quora (Remote)

Quora

3d•$219,989 - $320,613•Remote

About The Position

This is a remote-first, high-leverage individual contributor role working on Quora’s product. The Staff Machine Learning Engineer will define the technical direction of Quora’s recommendation ecosystem, own feed ranking and retrieval, lead high-impact modeling work, and explore the use of LLMs and generative models to improve content understanding and ranking. The role also includes scaling recommendation surfaces such as notifications and digest emails and building tools and abstractions for the broader engineering organization. The role is hands-on and organization-wide in scope. The engineer will write production code, mentor other engineers, and help shape the use of AI-assisted development. Quora is accepting applications on an ongoing basis; this position is a backfill for an existing vacancy. The role can be performed remotely from eligible countries, with availability for meetings and communication during coordination hours of Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Pacific Time.

Requirements

Availability for meetings and impromptu communication during Quora’s coordination hours, Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Pacific Time.
At least 6 years of professional software development experience in machine learning.
At least 4 years of professional experience building and optimizing home feed recommendation systems for social media and user-generated content platforms.
Deep knowledge of the full recommender stack, including candidate generation, retrieval, ranking, re-ranking, embeddings, and multi-objective optimization.
Deep understanding of the mathematical foundations of machine learning algorithms.
Experience leading large-scale machine learning projects end to end with measurable outcomes.
Strong communication and interpersonal skills.
BS, MS, or PhD in Computer Science.

Nice To Haves

At least 6 years of experience writing Python or C++ code.
Hands-on experience deploying and running generative models at scale.
Background in notifications, email or digest recommendations, or growth and lifecycle modeling.
Flexible and positive team player.
Publications at venues such as RecSys, KDD, NeurIPS, or ICML.
Passion for Quora’s mission and goals.

Responsibilities

Set the technical direction for Quora’s home feed recommendation systems.
Lead high-impact projects across the recommender stack, including candidate generation, retrieval, ranking, re-ranking, and multi-objective optimization.
Drive measurable improvements in user engagement and content quality through well-designed online experiments.
Own machine learning systems end to end, including data pipelines, candidate extraction, feature engineering, model training, and production integration.
Identify opportunities to apply machine learning to other parts of the Quora product.
Partner with product, data science, and infrastructure teams to align on priorities and tradeoffs.
Mentor engineers and lead by example, raising standards for code quality, modeling rigor, and AI-assisted development velocity.