{"id":3119478,"url":"https://alion.io/job/quora-staff-machine-learning-engineer-recommendation-systems-quora-remote","title":"Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Recommendation Systems - Quora (Remote)","company":{"id":7826,"name":"Quora","domain":"quora.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/quora","size_band":"201-500","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Ashby","truth_index":null},"role":"AI/ML","role_family":"AI/ML","seniority":"staff","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"remote","remote_scope":"stated_countries","remote_scope_basis":"posting_text","remote_working_hours":{"label":"PT","utc_offset_min":-8,"utc_offset_max":-8},"hiring_geo_confidence":"explicit","locations":[],"countries":[],"hiring_countries":["US"],"hiring_countries_total":1,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":{"min_usd":180000,"max_usd":338000,"period":"year","method":"role_seniority_country_remote_cell","sample_n":197},"experience_years_min":6,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":true,"technologies":[{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"C++","optional":false},{"name":"Embeddings","optional":false},{"name":"Machine Learning","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"Recommender Systems","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-10-22T20:52:48Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-10-22","last_verified_at":"2026-10-26T13:00:36Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":3,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":3},"description":"[Quora is a privately held, \"remote-first\" company. This position can be performed remotely from multiple countries around the world. Please visit careers.quora.com/eligible-countries for details regarding employment eligibility by country.]\nAbout Quora:\nQuora’s mission is to grow the world's collective intelligence. To do so, we have two platforms:\nQuora: a global knowledge sharing platform with millions of monthly unique visitors, bringing people together to share insights on various topics and providing a unique platform to learn and connect with others.\n\nPoe: a cloud workspace where millions of users run multiple AI agents on shared context and tools. One subscription, every frontier model, and the collaboration layer that makes them work together.\n\nBehind these products are passionate, collaborative, and high-performing global teams. We have a culture rooted in transparency, idea-sharing, and experimentation that allows us to celebrate success and grow together through meaningful work. Join us on this journey to create a positive impact and make a significant change in the world.\nThis role will be working on our Quora product.\nAbout the Team and Role:\nAt Quora, machine learning drives nearly every aspect of our product, and our lean, high-velocity engineering team tackles complex, high-impact challenges daily. We thrive in a remote-first culture built on absolute autonomy, continuous learning, and bold experimentation.\nWe are looking for a Staff Machine Learning Engineer to define the technical future of Quora’s recommendation ecosystem. In this role, you will own the technical direction for feed ranking and retrieval, lead our highest-impact modeling bets, and pioneer the integration of LLMs and generative models to redefine how we understand and rank content. Beyond the home feed, you will also scale recommendation surfaces like notifications and digest emails, while architecting the underlying tools and abstractions that empower our entire engineering organization.\nThis is a high-leverage, hands-on IC role with organization-wide scope. You will write production code, mentor rising talent, and actively shape how our team leverages AI-assisted development to accelerate our shipping velocity.\nResponsibilities:\nSet the technical direction for Quora’s home feed recommendation systems\n\nLead the highest-impact projects across the recommender stack, from candidate generation and retrieval to ranking, re-ranking, and multi-objective optimization\n\nDrive measurable improvements in user engagement and content quality through well-designed online experiments\n\nTake end-to-end ownership of ML systems, including data pipelines, candidate extraction, feature engineering, model training, and production integration\n\nIdentify new opportunities to apply machine learning to different parts of the Quora product\n\nPartner with product, data science, and infrastructure teams to align on priorities and tradeoffs\n\nMentor engineers and lead by example, raising the bar for code quality, modeling rigor and AI assisted dev velocity\n\nMinimum Requirements:\nAvailability for meetings and impromptu communication during Quora's “coordination hours \" (Mon-Fri: 9am-3pm Pacific Time)\n\n6+ years of professional software development experience in machine learning\n\n4+ years of professional experience building and optimizing Home Feed recommendation systems for social media and user-generated content platforms.\n\nDeep knowledge of the full recommender stack: candidate generation, retrieval, ranking, re-ranking, embeddings, and multi-objective optimization.\n\nDeep understanding of mathematical foundations of machine learning algorithms\n\nExperience leading large-scale ML projects end-to-end with measurable outcome\n\nStrong communication and interpersonal skills\n\nBS, MS, or PhD in Computer Science\n\nPreferred Requirements:\n6+ years of experience writing Python or C++ code\n\nHands-on experience deploying and running generative models at scale\n\nBackground in notifications, email/digest recommendations, or growth and lifecycle modeling\n\nFlexible and positive team player\n\nPublications at venues like RecSys, KDD, NeurIPS, or ICML.\n\nPassion for Quora's mission and goals\n\nAt Quora, we value diversity and inclusivity and welcome individuals from all backgrounds, including marginalized or underrepresented groups in tech, to apply for our job openings. We encourage all candidates who share a passion for growing the world’s knowledge, even those who may not strictly meet all the preferred requirements, to apply, as we know that a diverse range of perspectives can have a significant impact on our products and our culture.\nAdditional Information:\nWe are accepting applications on an ongoing basis. This role is a backfill for an existing vacancy.\nQuora offers a wide range of benefits including medical/dental/vision coverage, equity refreshers, remote work reimbursement, paid time off, employee assistance programs, and more. Benefits are country-specific and may vary.\nThere are many factors that will determine the starting compensation, including but not limited to experience, location, education, and business needs.\nUS candidates only: For US based applicants, the salary range is $219,989 - $320,613 USD + equity + benefits.\n\nCanada candidates only: For Toronto and Vancouver based applicants, the salary range is $282,469 - $329,337 CAD + equity + benefits. For all other locations in Canada, the salary range is $263,638 - $307,381 CAD + equity + benefits.\n\nIn equity-eligible countries, we currently also offer a flexible equity program where a portion of equity compensation may be taken as cash.\n\nWe are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity at our company. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.\nAI technology may assist in sorting applications and recording interview notes, but all decisions are made by a member of our team.\nTo ensure a secure hiring process, all final candidates will undergo identity verification and a comprehensive background check prior to onboarding.\nJob Applicant Privacy Notice: https://careers.quora.com/quora-global-job-applicant-privacy-notice\n#LI-SS2\n#LI-REMOTE","description_format":"text","description_chars":6276,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":6,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":{"level":"bachelor","optional":false},"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Continuous learning","Equity"],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"United States","iso":"US","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Q&A & Knowledge Platforms"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-10-22T23:50:14Z"}],"visa":[{"country":"US","licensed_sponsor":true,"evidence":"H-1B filings in 12 months: 11 · green card filings: 5","filings_12m":11,"filings_prev_12m":23,"green_card_filings_12m":5,"median_offered_wage_usd":185938,"route":null,"cap_exempt":false,"checked_at":"2026-10-15T11:24:14+00:00","sources":["US Department of Labor: LCA disclosure data (H-1B, H-1B1, E-3)","US Department of Labor: PERM disclosure data (green cards)"],"filings_for_role_12m":9}],"liveness":{"score":90,"band":"hot","label":"Hiring now","p_open":1,"p_active":0.903,"p_room":1,"age_days":3,"expected_fill_days":42,"reasons":["conf:1","velocity","win:early"],"computed_at":"2026-10-26T05:57:25Z"},"pay":null,"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/quora-staff-machine-learning-engineer-recommendation-systems-quora-remote","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/quora-staff-machine-learning-engineer-recommendation-systems-quora-remote.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-26T13:25:00Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":18616,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-27T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":7826},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=7826"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fquora-staff-machine-learning-engineer-recommendation-systems-quora-remote"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fquora-staff-machine-learning-engineer-recommendation-systems-quora-remote"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fquora-staff-machine-learning-engineer-recommendation-systems-quora-remote"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/quora-staff-machine-learning-engineer-recommendation-systems-quora-remote\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fquora-staff-machine-learning-engineer-recommendation-systems-quora-remote"}]}