Principal Machine Learning Scientist - Search & Recommendations

System1 in Seattle, WA

$164,500 - $268,200

System1 is looking for an experienced machine learning researcher and practitioner to join our data science and machine learning team as a Principal Machine Learning Scientist supporting the Search & Recommendations team.  This is a senior individual contributor role focused on driving research and development of new cutting-edge machine learning and artificial intelligence capabilities that power dynamic content decisioning for one of the biggest real-time acquisition marketing platforms in the world - reaching 100s of millions of users every month.

The ideal candidate will have experience leading efforts researching, developing, and deploying cutting-edge machine learning search, recommendations, and advanced personalization algorithms into production systems. You should keep up with the latest academic research and developments. You should have strong engineering skills and experience with integrating machine learning and engineering in a dynamic production environment.

With billions of data points ingested daily and the ability to impact and automate millions of critical decisions that drive the core of our business, this is a unique opportunity to build new advanced ML and AI capabilities at a company that still innovates at the pace of a startup but has the data and scale of a successful billion dollar company!
The U.S. base salary range for this full-time position is $164,500 - $268,200 + bonus + equity + benefits. Our salary ranges are determined by role, level, and location. The range displayed on each job posting reflects the minimum and maximum target for new hire salaries for the position across all US locations. Within the range, individual pay is determined by work location and additional factors, including job-related skills, experience, and relevant education or training. Your recruiter can share more about the specific salary range for your preferred location during the hiring process. Please note that the compensation details listed in U.S. role postings reflect the base salary only, and do not include bonus, equity, or benefits.
System1 offers flexible work arrangements for most employees (unless they hold positions which are identified as having to be 100% onsite in Marina del Rey, CA, Bellevue, WA or Guelph, ON Canada). Most System1 full-time employees choose to work in a hybrid environment, splitting their time between working in our offices and working remotely.  System1 allows fully-remote work in the following approved locations: Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Hawaii, Minnesota, Missouri, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Texas and Virginia. Prospective U.S. employees who live outside of any of these states will need to establish residency in one of the approved states prior to employment.



    • Provide both hands-on/individual contributor support and technical thought leadership in the development of highly scalable algorithms based on state-of-the-art machine learning models to build products delivering new recommendations, search, personalization, and dynamic content decisioning capabilities
    • Leverage knowledge of software engineering principles to guide development and deployment of production machine learning solutions that can scale to millions of requests per second with millisecond latency
    • Maintain expert knowledge in the latest in machine learning with an emphasis on emerging techniques in natural language understanding, semantic search, image recommendations, and optimal ranking
    • Actively contribute to the wider internal and external data science and machine learning communities by sharing and publishing research and findings
    • Work with cross-functional teams of engineers, scientists, and analysts, to devise implementation and experimentation strategies
    • Utilize broad and deep knowledge of machine learning to contribute to the development of System1’s roadmap for core machine learning capabilities
    • Coach and mentor data scientists to elevate the talent bar across System1
    • Bachelor's degree (Master's or PhD preferred) in a highly quantitative field (e.g. Computer Science, Engineering, Physics, Math, Operations Research, etc) or equivalent work experience
    • 5+ years of experience researching & developing algorithms for search and/or dynamic content recommendations
    • Strong machine learning and algorithmic background with a deep understanding of advanced language models, recommendations and search systems, and advanced deep learning techniques
    • Hands-on experience using high performance machine learning libraries and/or deep learning frameworks (e.g. PyTorch, Tensorflow, RAPIDs, etc)
    • Hands-on experience building ML driven products
    • Experience leading technical research and production grade development efforts/teams
    • Fluency with at least one data science/analytics programming language (e.g. Python, R, Julia)
    • Strong software design and implementation skills with a general-purpose programming language (e.g. Rust, Scala, C++/C#, Java, Haskell, etc)
    • Experience building scalable distributed products to implement batch, real-time, and streaming machine learning products
    • Strong functional programming development skills (preferred)
    • Ability to effectively communicate technical information to a wide spectrum of cross-functional team members
    • Experience mentoring and coaching junior team members
    • Competitive salary + bonus + equity
    • Generous PTO + 11 company holidays
    • Open sick time
    • 100% covered Medical, Dental, Vision for employees
    • 401k with match
    • Health & Dependent Care Flex Spending Account
    • Paid professional development
    • Leadership & growth opportunities
    • Virtual company and team building events
    • #BI-Remote
    • #LI-Remote
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