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Salary: USD 219,989 - 320,613 / annual
Quora is seeking a Staff Machine Learning Engineer to define the technical future of the company's recommendation ecosystem. This is a high-leverage, hands-on individual contributor role with organization-wide scope. You will own the technical direction for feed ranking and retrieval, lead the highest-impact modeling initiatives, and pioneer the integration of LLMs and generative models to redefine how Quora understands and ranks content.
Key responsibilities include setting the technical direction for Quora's home feed recommendation systems; leading high-impact projects across the recommender stack (candidate generation, retrieval, ranking, re-ranking, multi-objective optimization); driving measurable improvements in user engagement and content quality through well-designed online experiments; taking end-to-end ownership of ML systems including data pipelines, candidate extraction, feature engineering, model training, and production integration; identifying new opportunities to apply machine learning across the Quora product; partnering with product, data science, and infrastructure teams; and mentoring engineers while raising the bar for code quality, modeling rigor, and AI-assisted development velocity.
You will write production code, mentor rising talent, and actively shape how the team leverages AI-assisted development to accelerate shipping velocity. The role involves working on Quora's core platform, which is a global knowledge-sharing platform with millions of monthly unique visitors, as well as Poe, a cloud workspace where users run multiple AI agents.
Quora operates as a remote-first company with coordination hours Monday-Friday 9am-3pm Pacific Time for meetings and impromptu communication.
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 outcomes
- Strong communication and interpersonal skills
- BS, MS, or PhD in Computer Science
- Availability for meetings during Quora's coordination hours (Mon-Fri: 9am-3pm Pacific Time)
PREFERRED:
- 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
- Publications at venues like RecSys, KDD, NeurIPS, or ICML
- Passion for Quora's mission
