Senior Machine Learning Engineer

Overview

Senior Machine Learning Engineer to lead the design, architecture, and optimization of high-impact ML systems that serve millions of users in near real time. You will drive technical direction for ML initiatives, lead cross-team projects, mentor engineers, and influence the ML platform roadmap.

At Scribd (pronounced “scribbed”), our mission is to spark human curiosity. We democratize the exchange of ideas and information across our products:
Everand, Scribd, and Slideshare. We value grit—the intersection of passion and perseverance—and expect team members to pursue a GRIT-ty approach: set and achieve goals, deliver results, contribute innovative ideas, and positively influence the team through collaboration and attitude. Our culture supports flexible work with Scribd Flex and an emphasis on intentional in-person collaboration when needed.

We are seeking a Senior Machine Learning Engineer to lead the design, architecture, and optimization of high-impact ML systems that serve millions of users in near real time. In this role, you will:

• Drive technical direction for both platform and product-facing ML initiatives.
• Lead complex, cross-team projects from conception to production deployment.
• Mentor other engineers and establish best practices for building scalable, reliable ML systems.
• Influence the roadmap and architecture of our ML Platform.

Our ML team uses a range of technologies to build and operate large-scale ML systems, including Python, Golang, Scala, Ruby on Rails;
Airflow, Databricks, Spark; AWS Sage Maker, embedding-based retrieval (Weaviate), feature store, model registry, model serving platforms, and LLM providers; HTTP APIs, gRPC; AWS (Lambda, ECS, EKS, SQS, Elasti Cache, Cloud Watch);
Datadog, Terraform.

• Design and architecture of ML pipelines from data ingestion and feature engineering to model training, deployment, and monitoring.
• Own the technical direction of core ML Platform components such as the feature store, model registry, and embedding-based retrieval systems.
• Collaborate with product software engineers to deliver ML models that enhance recommendations, personalization, and generative AI features.
• Guide experimentation strategy, A/B testing design, and performance analysis to inform production decisions.
• Optimize systems for performance, scalability, and reliability across massive datasets and high-throughput services.
• Establish and uphold engineering best practices, including code quality, system design reviews, and operational excellence.
• Mentor and coach ML engineers, fostering technical growth and collaboration across the team.
• Work with leadership to align technical initiatives with long-term ML strategy.

Must Have

• 6+ years of experience as a professional ML or software engineer, with a proven track record of delivering production ML systems at scale.
• Proficiency in at least one key programming language (Python or Golang preferred; 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 (AWS, Azure, or GCP) and experience with deployment platforms (ECS, EKS, Lambda).
• 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.

Nice to Have

• Experience with embedding-based retrieval, large language models, advanced recommendation or ranking systems.
• Experience building or leading development of feature stores, model serving & monitoring platforms, and experimentation systems.
• Expertise in experimentation design, causal inference, or ML evaluation methodologies.
• Contributions to open-source ML/AI tooling or infrastructure.

As a Senior ML Engineer at Scribd, you will shape the future of ML systems, from foundational platform capabilities to AI applications. You’ll work with multimodal data, state-of-the-art retrieval and…