Quora Staff Machine Learning Engineer at Quora leading the technical direction of recommendation systems including feed ranking and retrieval. Responsible for end-to-end ownership of ML systems and integrating LLMs and generative models.
Responsibilities
Set the technical direction for Quora’s home feed recommendation systems
Lead the highest-impact projects across the recommender stack, from candidate generation and retrieval to ranking, re-ranking, and multi-objective optimization
Drive measurable improvements in user engagement and content quality through well-designed online experiments
Take end-to-end ownership of ML systems, including data pipelines, candidate extraction, feature engineering, model training, and production integration
Identify new opportunities to apply machine learning to different 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 the bar for code quality, modeling rigor and AI assisted dev velocity
Minimum Requirements:
Availability for meetings and impromptu communication during Quora's “coordination hours" (Mon-Fri: 9am-3pm Pacific Time)
6+ years of professional software development experience in machine learning
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: candidate generation, retrieval, ranking, re-ranking, embeddings, and multi-objective optimization.
Qualification
Background in notificationsFlexible and positive team playerPublications at venues like RecSysPassion for Quora's mission and goalsAt QuoraAdditional Information
Preferred
6+ years of experience writing Python or C++ code
Hands-on experience deploying and running generative models at scale
Background in notifications, email/digest recommendations, or growth and lifecycle modeling
Flexible and positive team player
Publications at venues like RecSys, KDD, NeurIPS, or ICML.
Passion for Quora's mission and goals
At Quora, we value diversity and inclusivity and welcome individuals from all backgrounds, including marginalized or underrepresented groups in tech, to apply for our job openings. We encourage all candidates who share a passion for growing the world’s knowledge, even those who may not strictly meet all the preferred requirements, to apply, as we know that a diverse range of perspectives can have a significant impact on our products and our culture.
