Senior Machine Learning Engineer
The Washington Post4 days ago
Washington, DC, USASenior
Base Salary
$120k - $199k/yr
Responsibilities
- Design, build, deploy, and operate production ML systems for generative AI, search, Revenue Science, and personalization.
- Translate research models and prototypes into scalable, reliable, and maintainable production systems.
- Build high-throughput, low-latency ranking and retrieval services for personalization, recommendation, search, and intelligent discovery.
- Develop reusable AI/ML platform capabilities for training, feature generation, experimentation, deployment, inference, model versioning, and monitoring.
- Design and optimize CPU and GPU inference systems for LLMs, embedding models, rerankers, ranking models, and other deep-learning workloads.
- Build online and batch ML architectures for feature pipelines, embedding generation, candidate retrieval, ranking, and model inference.
- Optimize model serving for latency, throughput, reliability, and cost through batching, caching, quantization, distillation, and hardware-aware optimization.
- Build production systems for semantic and hybrid search, vector retrieval, retrieval-augmented generation, recommendation, and agentic AI workflows.
- Establish ML observability for model quality, data and feature health, latency, throughput, failures, and resource utilization.
- Provide technical leadership through system design, architecture reviews, mentoring, and AI/ML platform roadmap development.
Requirements
- Bachelor’s degree or greater in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Machine Learning, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
- At least 5 years of experience in machine learning engineering, software engineering, or building large-scale production ML systems.
- Strong Python programming skills and experience with a production language such as C++, Java, Go, Scala, or Rust.
- Strong knowledge of data structures, algorithms, APIs, distributed systems, testing, and system design.
- Hands-on experience with PyTorch or another modern machine learning framework and deploying deep-learning models into production.
- Experience designing and operating end-to-end ML systems, including training, deployment, inference, monitoring, and continuous improvement.
- Strong understanding of low-latency online inference, including CPU/GPU serving, batching, caching, memory utilization, and performance optimization.
- Experience building search, retrieval, ranking, recommendation, generative AI, or related machine learning systems.
- Experience with Kubernetes, Docker, CI/CD, AWS, GCP, Spark, Beam, Kafka, or similar cloud and distributed-systems technologies.
- Experience with infrastructure as code, such as CloudFormation, CDK, or Terraform.
- Experience mentoring engineers, leading technical projects, and influencing AI/ML platform and architecture roadmaps.
Benefits
- Competitive medical, dental, and vision coverage.
- Company-paid pension and 401(k) match.
- Three weeks of vacation and up to three weeks of paid sick leave.
- Nine paid holidays and two personal days.
- Twenty weeks of paid parental leave for any new parent.
- Mental health resources, backup care, and caregiver concierge services.
- Gender-affirming services and pet insurance.
- Free Post digital subscription.
- Leadership and career development programs.
- Generally on-site five days per week, except for certain newsgathering and business-travel exceptions.
Tech Stack
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