Senior Staff Machine Learning Engineer (AI)

Location: New York, NY, United States; hybrid model requiring 3 days a week in the office, with the option to work onsite up to 5 days a week.

Salary: $240,000–$249,500 per year in New York.

Company

hirify.global operates Grubhub, a U.S. food ordering and delivery marketplace connecting diners with more than 415,000 merchants across over 4,000 cities.

What you will do

• Own the end-to-end architecture of ranking and recommendation systems, including candidate retrieval, multi-objective ranking, calibration, and conversion-versus-profitability ensembles.
• Lead the shift from short-term conversion optimization toward long-term diner value through offline evaluation and online experimentation.
• Bring information retrieval and recommender-systems research into production, including LLM-driven query understanding, embedding retrieval, sequential user representations, and real-time inference.
• Raise standards for model evaluation, reproducible training pipelines, safe deployment, SLOs, observability, and technical-debt management across multiple teams.
• Partner with Product, Search Engineering, Ads, and Data Platform to shape roadmaps and align data and infrastructure with model needs.
• Mentor engineers, participate in hiring, influence technical decisions across teams, and communicate trade-offs to technical, non-technical, and executive stakeholders.

Requirements

• MS or PhD in Computer Science, Mathematics, Physics, Engineering, Statistics, or another quantitative discipline, or equivalent experience.
• 8+ years of experience building and shipping machine learning systems, including 3+ years operating at staff-level scope across multiple teams, model families, or systems.
• Deep production experience with recommendation systems, ranking, or information retrieval at scale under real latency and cost constraints.
• Production deep-learning experience with TensorFlow or PyTorch, including training, serving, and tuning GPU-based runtime models.
• Experience with large language models and transformer architectures, including fine-tuning, embedding generation, and deployment in latency-sensitive applications.
• Strong data-engineering fundamentals with PySpark, Hive/SQL, the Python data stack, and debuggable feature pipelines.
• Experience designing A/B tests, selecting guardrails, and evaluating the limitations of offline metrics.
• Experience with cloud ML infrastructure such as AWS/SageMaker or equivalent, model deployment, production monitoring, and observability.
• Demonstrated technical leadership through mentoring, architecture and design reviews, cross-team influence, research synthesis, clear communication, and continuous learning.

Nice to have

• Experience applying language understanding to imperfect grammar in real-world search queries, menu text, and catalog content.

Culture & Benefits

• Hybrid collaboration with 3 required office days per week and optional onsite work up to 5 days per week.
• Equity and 401(k) benefits.
• Medical, dental, and vision plans, plus company-paid short- and long-term disability coverage.
• Paid time off, flexible time off for exempt employees, paid vacation for non-exempt employees, paid sick leave, and paid parental leave.
• Discounted meals and perks across the hirify.global family of brands.
• Commitment to diversity, equity, inclusion, and objective hiring practices.

Hiring process

• Interview scheduling and candidacy updates are provided by email or text.
• Accommodation requests can be shared during the interview process.