Newsbreak
Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Recommendation & AI Platform
Mountain View, California, United States. Posted 3 months ago
The role
This person will provide technical leadership for recommendation systems and AI initiatives. They will define technical direction for large-scale personalization systems and drive the adoption of AI and LLM technologies.
What you will do
- Lead the design of next-generation recommendation system architectures at scale.
- Drive best practices for model lifecycle management, experimentation, and system reliability.
- Partner with product, infra, and data teams to align technical strategy with business goals.
- Own complex initiatives across retrieval, ranking, re-ranking, and multi-objective optimization.
- Lead the application of LLMs and foundation models in recommendation, content intelligence, and user modeling.
- Evaluate emerging AI technologies and guide their adoption into production systems.
- Champion AI-native development practices, including LLM-assisted coding, experimentation, and analysis.
- Help establish standards and shared tooling for AI-driven engineering.
- Lead 0–1 AI initiatives, from ideation and technical validation to production rollout and scaling.
- Ensure successful prototypes evolve into maintainable, scalable platforms.
Required qualifications
- 8+ years of industry experience building large-scale ML or recommendation systems.
- Deep expertise in recommendation systems and applied machine learning in production environments.
- Strong system design skills and the ability to influence architecture across teams.
- Proven track record of technical leadership and cross-team collaboration.
Nice to have
- Demonstrated success applying LLMs or foundation models to recommendation or content systems in production.
- Experience leading 0 → 1 AI platform or product initiatives.
- Passion for improving engineering velocity through AI-assisted development workflows.
Benefits
- Health, dental, and vision care for you and your family
- Top-tier 401(K) plan with company matching
- Paid time off and paid holidays
- Paid parental leave
- FSA and commuter benefits programs
- Team activity budget
About the company
NewsBreak is a local life and news platform with more than 40 million monthly users. It includes platforms like NewsBreak, Nearby AI, and NDot AI.