Senior Machine Learning Engineer; Search

Senior Machine Learning Engineer (Search) – Scribd, Inc.

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At Scribd (pronounced “scribbed”), our mission is to spark human curiosity. Join our team as we create a world of stories and knowledge, democratize the exchange of ideas and information, and empower collective expertise through our four products:
Everand, Scribd, Slideshare, and Fable. We support a culture where our employees can be real and be bold; where we debate and commit as we embrace plot twists; and where every employee is empowered to take action as we prioritize the customer. We prioritize flexible work through Scribd Flex, allowing employees to choose a daily work-style that best suits their needs, while requiring occasional in‑person attendance for collaboration.

We hire for “GRIT” – demonstrating passion and perseverance toward long‑term goals. We look for the ability to set and achieve Goals, Results, Innovative ideas and solutions, and a positive influence on the Team.

The Search team powers personalized discovery across Scribd’s products, delivering relevant and engaging suggestions to millions of users. We operate at the intersection of large‑scale data, cutting‑edge machine learning, and product innovation – collaborating across brands and platforms to enhance user experiences in reading, listening, and learning. Our team blends frontend, backend, and ML engineers who partner closely with product managers, data scientists, and analysts.

We’re looking for a Senior Machine Learning Engineer to lead the design, architecture, and optimization of high‑impact ML discovery features that serve millions of users in near real time. You’ll work across the entire lifecycle – from data ingestion to model training, deployment, and monitoring – with a focus on creating fast, reliable, and cost‑efficient pipelines.

• Lead complex, cross‑team projects from conception to production deployment.
• Drive technical direction for end‑to‑end, production‑grade ML systems for advanced search capabilities and document understanding.
• Develop and operate services that power high‑traffic pipelines for content discovery and knowledge synthesis.
• Run large‑scale A/B and multivariate experiments to validate models and feature improvements.
• Mentor other engineers and establish best practices for building scalable, reliable ML systems.

• Languages:
  
  Python, Golang, Scala, Ruby on Rails
• Orchestration & Pipelines:
  Airflow, Databricks, Spark
• ML & AI: AWS Sagemaker, Embedding‑based Retrieval (Weaviate), Feature Store, Model Registry, Model Serving platforms (Weights & Biases), LLM providers like OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, etc.
• APIs & Integration: HTTP APIs, gRPC
• Infrastructure & Cloud: AWS (Lambda, ECS, EKS, SQS, Elasti Cache, Cloud Watch), Datadog, Terraform

• 6+ years of experience as a professional ML engineer or software engineer, with a proven track record of delivering production ML systems at scale.
• Proficiency in at least one key programming language (preferably Python or Golang; Scala or Ruby also considered).
• Expertise in designing and architecting large‑scale ML pipelines and distributed systems.
• Deep experience with distributed data processing frameworks (Spark, Databricks, or similar).
• Strong cloud expertise (preferably GCP; also AWS and/or Azure) and experience with deployment platforms (ECS, EKS, Lambda).
• Experience with embedding‑based retrieval, large language models, advanced information retrieval and ranking systems.
• Experience working with Search systems like query parsing, query intent classification, bm25, reranking, etc.
• Proven ability to optimize system performance and make informed trade‑offs in ML model and system design.
• Experience leading technical projects and mentoring engineers.
• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science or equivalent professional experience.

In San Francisco, the reasonable expected salary range is between $157,500 and $230,000. In the United States outside of California, the range is $129,500 to $220,000. In Canada, the range is $165,000 CAD to…