Quizlet · 2 weeks ago
Senior Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Personalization & Recommendations
San Francisco, CA
Full-time
Onsite
Senior Level, Lead/Staff
$248K/yr - $346K/yr
12+ years expQuizlet is a leading learning platform dedicated to enhancing educational outcomes through innovative technology. They are seeking a Senior Staff Machine Learning Engineer to architect and implement advanced personalization systems that improve learner experiences and drive engagement. This role involves collaborating with various teams to define technical strategies and mentor peers in the field of machine learning.
E-LearningEdTechEducationInternetKnowledge Management
Responsibilities
Work closely with other senior leaders to define and drive the long-term technical vision for personalization and recommendations across multiple Quizlet surfaces, ensuring alignment between modeling strategy, platform capabilities, and product roadmaps
Communicate complex modeling trade-offs and recommendations to diverse audiences (from senior leadership to cross-functional partners) influencing decisions through clear reasoning, data, and empathy
Architect and build large-scale personalization models across candidate retrieval, ranking, and post-ranking layers, leveraging user embeddings, contextual signals, and content features to power adaptive learning experiences
Develop scalable retrieval and serving systems using modern architectures such as Two-Tower, deep ranking, and ANN-based vector search for real-time personalization at global scale
Lead model training, evaluation, and deployment pipelines for retrieval and ranking systems, ensuring training-serving consistency, reliability, and robust monitoring
Partner closely with Product and Data Science to translate learning objectives (e.g., engagement, retention, and mastery) into measurable modeling goals and experimentation frameworks
Advance evaluation methodologies by refining offline metrics (e.g., NDCG, CTR, calibration) and online A/B testing to rigorously measure learner impact and model performance
Collaborate with platform and infrastructure teams to optimize distributed training, inference latency, and cost-efficient serving in production environments
Stay at the forefront of personalization and RecSys research, bringing relevant advances from top conferences (KDD, WSDM, SIGIR, RecSys, NeurIPS) into applied production systems
Mentor and coach engineers and applied scientists, fostering technical excellence, reproducibility, and responsible AI practices across the organization
Champion a culture of collaboration, inclusivity, and experimentation, helping elevate Quizlet’s AI craft and ensuring personalization systems serve learners equitably and effectively
Qualification
Required
12+ years of experience in applied machine learning or ML-heavy engineering, with deep expertise in personalization, ranking, or recommendation systems
Proven ability to shape technical direction across multiple teams or disciplines, balancing long-term architectural vision with near-term product and business priorities
Exceptional communication and storytelling skills — able to distill complex technical concepts into clear narratives for executives, product partners, and non-technical audiences
Demonstrated leadership through influence, guiding teams through ambiguity, aligning stakeholders around measurable goals, and ensuring accountability for impact
Experience mentoring senior engineers and applied scientists, leading technical working groups, and driving cross-team innovation and standardization
Track record of measurable impact, improving key online metrics such as CTR, retention, and engagement through recommender, ranking, or search systems in production
Deep technical understanding of modern retrieval and ranking architectures (e.g., Two-Tower, deep cross networks, GNNs, MMoE, Transformers) and multi-stage RecSys pipelines
Strong hands-on skills in Python and PyTorch, with expertise in data and feature engineering, distributed training and inference on GPUs, and familiarity with modern MLOps practices — including model registries, feature stores, monitoring, and drift detection
Experience with large-scale embedding models and vector search systems (FAISS, ScaNN, or similar), including training, serving, and optimization at scale
Expertise in experimentation and evaluation, connecting offline metrics (AUC, NDCG, calibration) with online A/B results to drive confident, data-informed decisions
Commitment to collaboration and inclusion, fostering a culture that values diverse perspectives, constructive debate, and shared ownership of results
Preferred
Publications or open-source contributions in RecSys, search, or ranking
Familiarity with reinforcement learning for recommendations or contextual bandits
Experience with hybrid RecSys systems blending collaborative filtering, content understanding, and LLM-based reasoning
Prior work in consumer or EdTech applications with personalization at scale
Benefits
20 vacation days that we expect you to take!
Competitive health, dental, and vision insurance (100% employee and 75% dependent PPO, Dental, VSP Choice)
Employer-sponsored 401k plan with company match
Access to LinkedIn Learning and other resources to support professional growth
Paid Family Leave, FSA, HSA, Commuter benefits, and Wellness benefits
40 hours of annual paid time off to participate in volunteer programs of choice
Company
Quizlet
Quizlet is a learning platform that uses activities and games to help students practice and master what they’re learning.
201-500 employees
H1B Sponsorship
Quizlet has a track record of offering H1B sponsorships. Please note that this does not
guarantee sponsorship for this specific role. Below presents additional info for your
reference. (Data Powered by US Department of Labor)
Distribution of Different Job Fields Receiving Sponsorship
Represents job field similar to this job
Trends of Total Sponsorships
2025 (12)
2024 (10)
2023 (7)
2022 (9)
2021 (1)
2020 (8)
Funding
Current Stage
Growth StageTotal Funding
$62MKey Investors
General AtlanticIcon Ventures
2020-05-13Series C· $30M
2018-02-06Series B· $20M
2015-11-23Series A· $12M
Leadership Team
Kurt Beidler
Chief Executive Officer
David Margulius
Board Member and Co-Founder
Recent News
2025-10-31
South Africa Today
2025-09-12
Mark Cuban Foundation
2025-09-09
Company data provided by crunchbase