Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Recommendation Systems - Quora (Remote)

Quora is hiring a Staff Machine Learning Engineer to define the technical direction of its recommendation systems. The role leads feed ranking and retrieval, develops machine learning systems across recommendation surfaces, and applies generative models to content understanding and ranking.

Responsibilities:

• Set the technical direction for Quora’s home feed recommendation systems
• Lead the highest-impact projects across the recommender stack, from candidate generation and retrieval to ranking, re-ranking, and multi-objective optimization
• Drive measurable improvements in user engagement and content quality through well-designed online experiments
• Take end-to-end ownership of ML systems, including data pipelines, candidate extraction, feature engineering, model training, and production integration
• Identify new opportunities to apply machine learning to different parts of the Quora product
• Partner with product, data science, and infrastructure teams to align on priorities and tradeoffs
• Mentor engineers and lead by example, raising the bar for code quality, modeling rigor and AI assisted dev velocity

Requirements:

• 6+ years of professional software development experience in machine learning
• 4+ years of professional experience building and optimizing Home Feed recommendation systems for social media and user-generated content platforms
• Deep knowledge of the full recommender stack: candidate generation, retrieval, ranking, re-ranking, embeddings, and multi-objective optimization
• Deep understanding of mathematical foundations of machine learning algorithms
• Experience leading large-scale ML projects end-to-end with measurable outcome
• Strong communication and interpersonal skills
• BS, MS, or PhD in Computer Science
• 6+ years of experience writing Python or C++ code
• Hands-on experience deploying and running generative models at scale
• Background in notifications, email/digest recommendations, or growth and lifecycle modeling
• Flexible and positive team player
• Publications at venues like RecSys, KDD, NeurIPS, or ICML
• Passion for Quora's mission and goals