Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Recommendation Systems - Quora
Job description
Staff Machine Learning Engineer at Quora responsible for defining the technical direction of Quora's recommendation ecosystem, including home feed ranking and retrieval. The role is a hands-on IC position with organization-wide scope, working on the Quora product.
At a glance
- Employment
- Full-time · Employee (employment agreement)
- Work mode
- Remote · Worldwide
- Pay
- USD 219,989 – 320,613 / year
What you'll do
- 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
What we're looking for
- 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
- Deep understanding of mathematical foundations of machine learning algorithms
- Experience leading large-scale ML projects end-to-end with measurable outcome
- Strong communication and interpersonal skills
- BS, MS, or PhD in Computer Science
Nice to have
- 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
Your team
Engineering
Lean, high-velocity engineering team that tackles complex, high-impact challenges daily, in a remote-first culture built on autonomy, continuous learning, and bold experimentation.
Benefits
- Medical/dental/vision coverage
- Equity refreshers
- Remote work reimbursement
- Paid time off
- Employee assistance programs
- Flexible equity program where a portion of equity compensation may be taken as cash (in equity-eligible countries)
How to get hired
- 1AI technology may assist in sorting applications and recording interview notes, but all decisions are made by a member of our team
- 2All final candidates will undergo identity verification and a comprehensive background check prior to onboarding
Apply
Direct apply at Quora
Opens the job posting at Quora
About Quora
Quora is a privately held, remote-first company with two platforms: Quora, a global knowledge sharing platform with millions of monthly unique visitors, and Poe, a cloud workspace where millions of users run multiple AI agents on shared context and tools.
Mission
To grow the world's collective intelligence.
Key facts
- Privately held, remote-first company
- Quora has millions of monthly unique visitors
- Poe is a cloud workspace where millions of users run multiple AI agents on shared context and tools
- This role will be working on the Quora product
- This role is a backfill for an existing vacancy
- Accepting applications on an ongoing basis
What they value
- Transparency
- Idea-sharing
- Experimentation
- Diversity and inclusivity
- Absolute autonomy
- Continuous learning
- Bold experimentation