Machine Learning Engineer (Senior - Senior Staff Level)

Location: New York, NY, United States; full-time onsite role.

Base salary: $176,000–$191,000 for Senior MLE; $208,500–$225,000 for Staff MLE; $240,000–$260,000 for Senior Staff MLE.

Company

hirify.global builds a technology-enabled food and dining business supported by personalized discovery, search, and recommendation systems.

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 evolution from short-term conversion optimization toward long-term diner value through offline evaluation and online experimentation.
• Apply information retrieval and recommender-systems research, including LLM-driven query understanding, embedding retrieval, sequential user representations, and real-time inference.
• Improve model evaluation, reproducible training pipelines, deployment safety, SLOs, observability, and technical-debt management across multiple teams.
• Partner with Product, Search Engineering, Ads, and Data Platform to shape roadmaps, manage risks, and ensure required data and infrastructure are available.
• Mentor engineers, participate in hiring, lead architecture reviews, communicate technical trade-offs to executive stakeholders, and document key decisions.

Requirements

• MS or PhD in Computer Science, Math, Physics, Engineering, Statistics, or another quantitative discipline, or equivalent experience.
• 4–8+ years building and shipping machine learning systems; Senior Staff scope additionally requires 3+ years setting technical direction across multiple teams, model families, or systems.
• Deep production experience with recommendation systems, ranking, or information retrieval at scale under 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 feature pipelines.
• Experience designing A/B tests, selecting guardrails, and evaluating the limitations of offline metrics.
• Experience with AWS/SageMaker or equivalent cloud ML infrastructure, model deployment, monitoring, and observability.
• Technical leadership, mentoring, cross-team architecture influence, executive communication, research synthesis, and continuous self-directed learning.

Nice to have

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

Culture & Benefits

• Equity and a 401(k) are included in the compensation package.
• Medical, dental, and vision plan options are available.
• Company-paid short- and long-term disability coverage is provided.
• Benefits include paid time off, flexible time off for exempt employees, paid vacation for non-exempt employees, paid sick leave, and paid parental leave.
• Employees receive discounted meals and exclusive perks across the hirify.global family of brands.
• hirify.global participates in the federal E-Verify program and provides interview accommodations upon request.

Hiring process

• Interview scheduling and candidacy information are shared by email or text.