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Salary: USD 189,507 - 274,604 / annual
Quora is seeking a Senior Machine Learning Engineer to join the Monetization team's Ads ML group. This role focuses on optimizing Quora's advertising platform, which serves over 300 million monthly unique visitors and supports thousands of advertisers.
You will own end-to-end machine learning systems for ads ranking, including research, data pipelines, feature engineering, model training, deployment, and production maintenance. Your work will directly impact the company's revenue and user experience.
Key responsibilities include:
- Developing and improving ads ranking models, including CTR/CVR prediction, feature interactions, user-history modeling, and calibration
- Building scalable ML systems from data pipelines through production integration
- Evaluating and applying advances in deep learning and recommendation modeling within production constraints
- Collaborating with ML platform, product, and engineering teams to build efficient systems
- Partnering with product and data science teams to define ranking objectives, design A/B experiments, and measure advertiser performance and revenue impact
- Identifying new opportunities to apply ML across the Ads product
Quora operates as a remote-first company with a culture rooted in transparency, idea-sharing, and experimentation. The team uses continuous deployment for rapid iteration. This is a small, close-knit team where individual engineers have significant autonomy and direct impact on product and company outcomes.
REQUIREMENTS:
- 4+ years of professional software development experience in machine learning
- Hands-on experience developing and deploying ads ranking models at scale, including CTR or CVR prediction and calibration, with demonstrated ownership of production improvements
- Experience evaluating ranking models through offline analysis and online experiments, including investigating discrepancies between model metrics and business outcomes
- Experience using AI-assisted development tools for coding, testing, debugging, or data analysis, with sound judgment in validating generated code and conclusions
- Hands-on experience building and deploying deep learning models with PyTorch or TensorFlow
- Strong understanding of mathematical foundations of machine learning algorithms
- Strong Python programming skills and experience writing maintainable production ML code
- BS, MS, or PhD in Computer Science, Engineering, or related technical field
- Availability for meetings and communication during Quora's coordination hours (Mon-Fri: 9am-3pm Pacific Time)
PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS:
- Experience with modern ranking architectures (feature interaction networks, attention-based user-sequence models, multi-task learning)
- Understanding of how ranking predictions and calibration interact with bidding and auctions
- Experience leading large-scale multi-engineer projects
- Experience addressing ranking challenges (sparse/delayed conversion labels, sampling bias, cold-start users, training-serving inconsistencies)
- Experience with generative recommender systems
- Strong communication and leadership skills
