{"id":2970574,"url":"https://alion.io/job/sekai-senior-machine-learning-engineer-recommendation","title":"Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Recommendation","company":{"id":720617,"name":"Sekai","domain":"sekai.ai","url":"https://alion.io/company/sekai","size_band":"51-200","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Ashby","truth_index":{"grade":"B","score":75,"open_postings":4,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":1,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":null,"computed_at":"2026-10-26T05:57:25Z"}},"role":"AI/ML","role_family":"AI/ML","seniority":"senior","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["San Francisco, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":{"min_usd":171000,"max_usd":330000,"period":"year","method":"role_seniority_country_remote_cell","sample_n":1332},"experience_years_min":5,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"Machine Learning","optional":false},{"name":"Recommender Systems","optional":false},{"name":"LLM","optional":true},{"name":"Multimodal AI","optional":true},{"name":"Reinforcement Learning","optional":true},{"name":"Semantic Search","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-10-20T23:42:25Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-10-20","last_verified_at":"2026-10-26T06:13:29Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":5,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":5},"description":"Sekai is building the TikTok for mini apps - an AI-driven consumer platform where people create, remix, share, and play interactive content instantly.\nWe are a Series A company backed by Khosla, a16z and Mayfield, with $30M raised to date. We are remote-first across all positions and are looking for ambitious, AI-native builders who want to help shape the next generation of consumer social products.\nDownload our app and give it a try!\nAndroid: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=chat.sekai.app&hl=en_US\n\niOS: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/sekai-create-remix-play/id6504506653\n\nAbout the Role\nWe are looking for a Senior Machine Learning Engineer to own search and recommendation systems for Sekai’s consumer product.\nThis role sits at the center of content discovery, user engagement, and content distribution. You will build the models and systems that decide what users see, what they search for, what they continue playing, and how high-quality content reaches the right audience.\nThis is a senior IC role for someone who has built real recommendation, search, ranking, or discovery systems in production for consumer apps, especially in entertainment-driven products.\nWhat You Will Own\nBuild and improve recommendation and search systems across feed, discovery, search, and content continuation surfaces.\n\nOwn retrieval and ranking systems, including candidate generation, embedding-based retrieval, two-tower models, ranking features, and online serving quality.\n\nDesign, launch, and analyze recommendation/search experiments end-to-end, then use the data to iterate quickly.\n\nImprove recommendation quality for new users, new content, and fast-changing content pools.\n\nBuild user, content, creator, and session-level representations from behavioral signals.\n\nPartner with product, data, and engineering teams to define metrics, run experiments, and ship measurable improvements to retention, engagement, and content distribution.\n\nBuild practical ML systems that can move from prototype to production quickly, with clear monitoring and evaluation.\n\nHelp shape the long-term ML architecture for AI-native content discovery.\n\nWhat We Are Looking For\n5+ years of industry experience building production ML systems, with senior-level ownership of recommendation, search, ranking, ads ranking, feed ranking, or content discovery systems.\n\nHands-on experience building recommendation or search systems for consumer apps.\n\nExperience working on entertainment, social, gaming, short-form content, creator, or other engagement-driven consumer products.\n\nStrong practical experience with two-tower models, embedding retrieval, candidate generation, ranking, and online/offline evaluation.\n\nStrong product intuition around relevance, retention, engagement, satisfaction, cold start, and content distribution.\n\nAbility to translate messy user behavior into useful modeling signals and practical product improvements.\n\nStrong engineering fundamentals across modeling, data pipelines, backend integration, experimentation, and production ML systems.\n\nHigh ownership, fast execution, and clear communication in ambiguous product environments.\n\nNice to Have\nExperience with AI recommendation, LLM-powered ranking, semantic search, personalized generation, or AI-native content understanding.\n\nExperience with UGC content ecosystems, creator marketplaces, or rapidly changing content catalogs.\n\nExperience with multimodal content understanding across text, image, video, interaction traces, or generated content.\n\nExperience with explore/exploit, contextual bandits, reinforcement learning, or long-term value optimization.\n\nStartup experience or experience building 0-to-1 ML systems with limited infrastructure.\n\nBenefits\nTop compensation package, including competitive salary and meaningful equity.\n\nComprehensive health insurance and benefits.\n\nIf you are excited about building at the frontier of AI, consumer social, and interactive entertainment, we would love to hear from you.\nAt Sekai, you will work with an AI-native team, move fast, own meaningful problems, and have the flexibility to explore new ideas from an early stage.\nIf you are excited about building at the frontier of AI, consumer social, and interactive entertainment, we would love to hear from you.\nAt Sekai, you will work with an AI-native team, move fast, own meaningful problems, and have the flexibility to explore new ideas from an early stage.","description_format":"text","description_chars":4428,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":5,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Equity","Health 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