{"id":119986,"url":"https://alion.io/job/shopback-machine-learning-engineer-recommendations-personalization","title":"Machine Learning Engineer - Recommendations & Personalization","company":{"id":4084,"name":"ShopBack","domain":"shopback.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/shopback","size_band":"1001-5000","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Lever","truth_index":{"grade":"B","score":79,"open_postings":20,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0.85,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":57,"computed_at":"2026-10-16T05:45:00Z"}},"role":"AI/ML","role_family":"AI/ML","seniority":"junior","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Shenzhen, China"],"countries":["CN"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":2,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"Amazon SageMaker","optional":false},{"name":"AWS","optional":false},{"name":"DPO","optional":false},{"name":"Embeddings","optional":false},{"name":"Fine-tuning","optional":false},{"name":"Hugging Face","optional":false},{"name":"LLM","optional":false},{"name":"LoRA","optional":false},{"name":"PEFT","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"PyTorch","optional":false},{"name":"SFT","optional":false},{"name":"Spark","optional":false},{"name":"TRL","optional":false},{"name":"vLLM","optional":false},{"name":"AI Agents","optional":true},{"name":"Transformers","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-08-18T02:49:44Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-08-18","last_verified_at":"2026-10-16T15:30:02Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":59,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":59},"description":"Your Adventure Ahead\nOwn recommendation and personalization end-to-end: Build and iterate the ML systems behind ShopBack's personalized shopping experience, recommendations, ranking, user modeling, and CRM intelligence. Own the change end-to-end - dataset, training, offline eval, A/B, rollout - and be measured on offline and online metrics.\n\nBlend classic ML with modern LLM techniques: Apply fine-tuned open-source models, embedding models, and LLM-based models where they beat classic methods, and know when they don't.\n\nShip with evidence: Build evaluation sets and experiment harnesses before shipping models; foster a fast-paced, high-iteration experimentation culture (A/B, interleaving, causal reads).\n\nRaise the team: Mentor our ML engineers on modern recommendation and LLM practice; your success includes the team's growth, not just your own output.\n\nMetrics driven: Understand the business and product metrics behind personalization, and drive efforts that move them.\n\nHandle ambiguity: Navigate loosely defined problems effectively, with or without dedicated Product Manager support.\n\nCollaboration: Work closely with product, ops, and CRM stakeholders to set and achieve optimal outcomes.\n\nEssentials to Succeed\nHas shipped and iterated recommendation / personalization / ranking or search systems serving millions of users, and can walk through what moved the metrics, what didn't, and why (typically 2+ years of industrial ML experience).\n\nStrong grounding in retrieval and ranking modeling, embeddings, and online experimentation.\n\nHands-on fine-tuning of open-source models/LLMs (SFT / LoRA / DPO) applied to ranking, personalization, or user modeling, and the judgment of when classic methods win.\n\nBuilds evaluation sets and harnesses as a default step, not an afterthought.\n\nUnderstands dataset licensing and provenance for commercial use.\n\nSolid MLOps fundamentals: data pipelines, productionisation, monitoring, and GPU cost awareness.\n\nComfortable in a batch data stack - Spark or equivalent, a scheduler(e.g. Airflow), cloud training and serving (e.g. AWS SageMaker). You’d own the model through ingestion, training, serving, monitoring, retraining and rollback.\n\nStrong Python and PyTorch; familiarity with the Hugging Face ecosystem (transformers / PEFT / TRL) and modern inference stacks (e.g. vLLM) is a plus.\n\nUses agentic AI tools as a daily driver for engineering work, and can show how they changed your workflow.\n\nEducation in a quantitative field such as Computer Science, Statistics, or Mathematics, or equivalent practical depth.\n\nStrong desire to solve tough problems with scientific rigour at scale, and to get results early and iterate.","description_format":"text","description_chars":2677,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":2,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":[],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Loyalty Programs","Price Comparison","Coupons, Deals & Cashbacks"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-08-18T02:49:44Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":20,"band":"cold","label":"Long shot","p_open":1,"p_active":0.455,"p_room":0.44,"age_days":59,"expected_fill_days":57,"reasons":["conf:3","stale_co","velocity","win:tail","crowd:junior"],"computed_at":"2026-10-16T05:45:00Z"},"pay":null,"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/shopback-machine-learning-engineer-recommendations-personalization","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/shopback-machine-learning-engineer-recommendations-personalization.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-16T17:40:40Z","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":2350,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-17T00:00:00Z"}},"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":4084},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=4084"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fshopback-machine-learning-engineer-recommendations-personalization"},{"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%2Fshopback-machine-learning-engineer-recommendations-personalization"},{"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%2Fshopback-machine-learning-engineer-recommendations-personalization"},{"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/shopback-machine-learning-engineer-recommendations-personalization\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fshopback-machine-learning-engineer-recommendations-personalization"}]}