Staff Machine Learning Engineer (Ranking)

TL;DR

Staff Machine Learning Engineer (Ranking/ML): Technical ownership of the core ranking system to connect people with Taskers with an accent on model design, production reliability, and architecture. Focus on building automated retraining pipelines, addressing position bias, and leveraging client intent signals to drive conversion.

Location: Hybrid: 2 days per week in San Francisco hub (Tuesdays & Wednesdays). Must be legally authorized to work in the US without employer sponsorship.

Salary: $170,000 - $225,000 (base pay)

Company

A marketplace platform connecting people with Taskers for home services, operating in partnership with IKEA.

What you will do

• Own the architecture, model design, and production reliability of the core ranking system end-to-end.
• Serve as the primary technical interface for Product, Data Science, Risk, and Commerce on all matching and ranking initiatives.
• Build automated retraining pipelines, rollback capabilities, and skew detection to prevent model drift.
• Address position bias and systemic biases in the ranking pipeline to improve training data quality.
• Implement personalization and leverage behavioral data from high-booking cohorts to increase conversion.
• Mentor junior and senior engineers, driving the technical bar through design reviews and new methodologies.

Requirements

• 8+ years of industry experience building and deploying production-grade ML systems.
• Deep expertise in ranking, recommender systems, or two-sided marketplace ML.
• Strong proficiency in Python and SQL.
• Hands-on experience with ML libraries (PyTorch, TensorFlow, scikit-learn, LightGBM/XGBoost).
• Experience with modern data infrastructure including Kafka, Airflow, Snowflake/BigQuery, and Docker/Kubernetes.
• Must be legally authorized to work in the United States without visa sponsorship.

Nice to have

• Familiarity with dbt.
• Experience with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform) and CI/CD pipelines.
• Proficiency in AI coding tools (e.g., Claude Code, Augment) across the software development lifecycle.

Culture & Benefits

• Hybrid work model balancing flexibility with regular in-person connection.
• Employer-paid health insurance and 401k match for US employees.
• Generous flexible time off including two company-wide closure weeks.
• Stipends for wellness, productivity, and education, plus hirify.global product stipends.
• IKEA employee discounts.