Senior Recommendation Engineer

The role

You will build and own recommendation and ranking systems for feed surfaces, event-triggered engagement, and two-sided matching. You will design objective functions that reflect high-consequence household decisions.

What you will do

• Build and own recommendation and ranking systems for feed surfaces.
• Design the event-triggered engagement engine with the messaging platform team.
• Build customer-to-professional matching using transparent rules and learned ranking.
• Define evaluation frameworks that treat downstream outcomes and negative signals as objectives.
• Contribute learnings back to the company's pricing and intent models.

Required qualifications

• 5+ years of machine-learning or software engineering.
• 3+ years shipping recommendation or ranking systems in production.
• Built and operated a ranking system at consumer scale with millions of users.
• Substantial online experimentation experience on ranking changes.
• Deployed an uplift, causal, or counterfactual model in production, or can give a rigorous account of why click-based objectives are wrong for rare, high-cost decisions.
• Strong Python.
• At least one of Java, Scala, or Go.
• Production experience with feature stores and streaming pipelines.
• Ability to explain modeling decisions to product and business stakeholders.
• Ability to defend experimental design under commercial pressure.

Nice to have

• Feed or notification ranking at a content or media company.
• Two-sided marketplace matching with fairness or exposure constraints in production.
• Domains with low-frequency, high-consequence decisions such as insurance, healthcare, or real estate.
• Publications or open-source contributions in recommendation, causal inference, or marketplace design.

Benefits

• discretionary bonus
• options

About the company

NewsBreak is a local life and news platform with more than 40 million monthly users. Nearby AI is a new company from NewsBreak building a trust-first marketplace for local home services.