Machine Learning Engineer, Local Search & Marketplace

The role

You will build and improve machine learning models for search, recommendation, ranking, retrieval, matching, and personalization. You will develop systems to understand user queries, behaviors, and context to connect consumers with local information and services.

What you will do

• Build and improve machine learning models for search, recommendation, ranking, retrieval, matching, and personalization.
• Develop systems that understand user queries, behaviors, preferences, and context.
• Apply embeddings, natural language processing, large language models, and modern retrieval techniques.
• Build and optimize end-to-end ML pipelines from data preparation to online serving and monitoring.
• Partner with product, engineering, and data teams to translate business needs into scalable ML solutions.
• Design and analyze online and offline experiments to measure model quality and product impact.
• Improve key product outcomes such as relevance, engagement, conversion, retention, and marketplace efficiency.
• Explore new ML and LLM techniques and bring them into production.

Required qualifications

• Experience building machine learning, data mining, search, recommendation, ranking, NLP, or related systems through academic projects, internships, or industry work.
• Strong programming skills in Python, Java, C++, or another relevant language.
• Solid understanding of machine learning fundamentals, data structures, algorithms, and statistical analysis.
• Experience with one or more of the following: Search, retrieval, or learning-to-rank; Recommendation or personalization; Query understanding, intent classification, or NLP; Embeddings, semantic search
• Ability to work with large-scale or complex datasets and translate ambiguous problems into practical solutions.
• Strong collaboration and communication skills.
• Interest in building production systems that serve real users and deliver measurable product impact.

Nice to have

• Experience deploying and maintaining machine learning models in production.
• Experience with experimentation, including A/B testing, causal analysis, or marketplace experiments.
• Familiarity with deep learning frameworks and ML infrastructure, such as PyTorch, TensorFlow, Spark, Kubernetes, or feature and model-serving platforms.
• Experience building taxonomies, user-interest representations, knowledge graphs, or behavioral models.
• Experience applying LLMs to search, recommendation, classification, or information retrieval.
• Background in local search, local services, maps, commerce, marketplaces, delivery, mobility, or location-based products.
• Experience at a consumer internet, search, recommendation, advertising, e-commerce, or marketplace company.

About the company

NewsBreak is a local life and news platform with more than 40 million monthly users. The company includes platforms such as NewsBreak, Nearby AI, and NDot AI.