Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Recommendation Systems

📋 Job Overview

Quora is a privately held, \"remote-first\" company. This position can be performed remotely from multiple countries around the world. Join us on this journey to create a positive impact and make a significant change in the world. This role will be working on our Quora product.

🏢 About Quora

Quora’s mission is to grow the world's collective intelligence. We have two platforms: Quora, a global knowledge sharing platform with millions of monthly unique visitors, and Poe, a cloud workspace where millions of users run multiple AI agents on shared context and tools. We have a culture rooted in transparency, idea-sharing, and experimentation that allows us to celebrate success and grow together through meaningful work.

🎯 The Role

We are looking for a Staff Machine Learning Engineer to define the technical future of Quora’s recommendation ecosystem. In this role, you will own the technical direction for feed ranking and retrieval, lead our highest-impact modeling bets, and pioneer the integration of LLMs and generative models to redefine how we understand and rank content. You will also scale recommendation surfaces like notifications and digest emails, while architecting the underlying tools and abstractions that empower our entire engineering organization.

✅ Key Responsibilities

• Set the technical direction for Quora’s home feed recommendation systems
• Lead the highest-impact projects across the recommender stack, from candidate generation and retrieval to ranking, re-ranking, and multi-objective optimization
• Drive measurable improvements in user engagement and content quality through well-designed online experiments
• Take end-to-end ownership of ML systems, including data pipelines, candidate extraction, feature engineering, model training, and production integration
• Identify new opportunities to apply machine learning to different parts of the Quora product
• Partner with product, data science, and infrastructure teams to align on priorities and tradeoffs
• Mentor engineers and lead by example, raising the bar for code quality, modeling rigor and AI assisted dev velocity

📌 Required Qualifications

• Availability for meetings and impromptu communication during Quora's “coordination hours" (Mon-Fri: 9am-3pm Pacific Time)
• 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 outcome
• Strong communication and interpersonal skills
• BS, MS, or PhD in Computer Science

⭐ Desirable Experience

• 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
• Flexible and positive team player
• Publications at venues like RecSys, KDD, NeurIPS, or ICML.
• Passion for Quora's mission and goals

🎁 Benefits

Quora offers a wide range of benefits including medical/dental/vision coverage, equity refreshers, remote work reimbursement, paid time off, employee assistance programs, and more. Benefits are country-specific and may vary.

🛂 Visa & Eligibility

At Quora, we value diversity and inclusivity and welcome individuals from all backgrounds, including marginalized or underrepresented groups in tech, to apply for our job openings. We encourage all candidates who share a passion for growing the world’s knowledge, even those who may not strictly meet all the preferred requirements, to apply, as we know that a diverse range of perspectives can have a significant impact on our products and our culture.