Staff Machine Learning Engineer (AI R&D)

Location: Hybrid role based in the Menlo Park, California or Bellevue, Washington offices, with in-person attendance expected at least 3 days per week.

Base pay for Zone 1 locations: $255,000–$300,000 USD per year, plus bonus opportunities, equity, and benefits. Other compensation zones are $225,000–$264,000 USD and $199,000–$234,000 USD.

Company

Robinhood is a fintech company building products designed to democratize finance and apply intelligent systems to financial services.

What you will do

• Design, build, deploy, and monitor personalization, ranking, and recommendation systems for growth, social feeds, search, and other core products.
• Partner with product, data engineering, and platform teams to define technical strategy and deliver complex projects across multiple workstreams.
• Lead zero-to-one development of production ML capabilities in a regulated fintech environment.
• Evaluate and integrate agentic workflows, LLM fine-tuning, and other modern AI approaches into existing ML systems.
• Set technical standards through architecture and code reviews while mentoring ML engineers.

Requirements

• 10+ years of experience as a Machine Learning Engineer.
• Strong foundation in ranking, recommendation systems, deep learning, optimization, and production ML at scale.
• End-to-end ownership of personalization and recommendation systems in a high-traffic, data-rich environment.
• Experience delivering ambiguous, high-impact projects from zero to one.
• Exposure to or hands-on experience with agentic systems, LLM fine-tuning, or other modern AI paradigms.
• Master’s degree in Computer Science, Statistics, or a related field, or equivalent professional experience; strong Python skills and familiarity with ML infrastructure tooling.

Culture & Benefits

• High-impact work focused on personalization, search, social feeds, fraud detection, and risk management for millions of users.
• Performance-driven compensation with bonus programs, equity ownership, and 401(k) matching.
• 100% paid employee health insurance and 90% dependent coverage.
• Flexible lifestyle wallet for wellness, learning, and other eligible expenses.
• Paid time off, sick time, company holidays, parental leave, life and disability insurance, fertility benefits, and mental health benefits.
• Access to AI tools, ongoing AI skill-building, catered meals, events, and supported office workspaces.