Senior Data & Machine Learning Engineer
Confirmed on the employer's own hiring board on Nov 15, 2026. First seen by Alion on Nov 15, 2026.
About the Role
Join a small team building AI-powered consumer modeling and personalized advertising technology. You will own the recommendation and matching stack end to end, from model development through production serving, helping improve relevance and performance for advertisers, publishers, and subscribers.
What You'll Do
Build retrieval, ranking, and re-ranking systems that match ads with recipients.
Develop embedding and vector-search infrastructure for real-time ad selection.
Optimize ranking across click-through rate, advertiser return, publisher revenue, and subscriber relevance.
Own feature storage and the full serving path, including offline training, online inference, and pipeline health.
Apply large language models and foundation models to subscriber tagging, content understanding, and user modeling.
Lead initiatives from prototype to production, including online learning, feedback loops, ETL/ELT pipelines, and warehouse transformations.
Build dashboards and automated scorecards to track performance and key metrics.
Work with company leadership and engineering to prioritize and scale the recommendation system.
Help shape the future of the ML team and grow into a leadership role.
What We're Looking For
5 to 16 years of experience in production machine learning or data engineering, including at least 3 years working with recommendation, ranking, or advertising systems.
Experience building and shipping production recommendation or matching systems across candidate generation, ranking, embedding-based retrieval, serving, and evaluation.
Background building advertising recommender models, such as ad ranking, click-through or conversion prediction, or ad matching.
Hands-on experience with embeddings and real-time vector search tools such as FAISS, Milvus, Pinecone, pgvector, or similar.
Experience building and maintaining data pipelines and transformation layers using SQL and dbt or comparable tools.
Ability to independently investigate data, develop hypotheses, and run experiments.
Must be authorized to work in the United States without visa sponsorship.
Early-stage startup, founder, advanced degree, or ML team-building experience is a plus.
Compensation & Benefits
Base salary: $200,000 to $300,000 annually. Visa sponsorship is not available.
Location
Hybrid, with candidates based in the New York City area or in a nearby U.S. time zone who can travel to New York City quarterly.