Staff Machine Learning Engineer - Search

Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Search & Personalization, Content Discovery

Location: Seattle, San Francisco Bay Area, New York

We're looking for a Staff Machine Learning Engineer to lead the design and evolution of ML and AI driven search algorithms for our global streaming app, HBO Max. This role will own the end-to-end search algorithm innovation from retrieval and ranking to personalization and experimentation, impacting how millions of users discover content globally.

You will operate at the intersection of ML, systems, and product, bringing both deep expertise in search/relevance systems and strong technical leadership. You'll help define the roadmap, drive architecture decisions, and elevate the team's ability to build and iterate on high-quality search experiences.

Responsibilities:

• Lead the design and development of large-scale model driven search algorithms including retrieval, ranking, and query understanding
• Define and evolve the technical strategy for search, balancing relevance, latency, and scalability
• Drive end-to-end ML systems: data pipelines, feature engineering, model training, experimentation, and serving
• Partner closely with product, data, and infrastructure teams to shape and execute on the search roadmap and user experience
• Mentor engineers and data scientists and raise the bar on algorithm development, system design, ML and engineering practices
• Identify and drive high-impact opportunities across search and personalization
• Motivate, inspire and create a culture of experimentation and data-driven innovation while constantly striving to be an advocate for doing what is right for our customers

Requirements:

• 8+ years of industry experience, with 4+ years as tech lead experience (preferred)
• Deep expertise in search and/or ranking algorithms (e.g., retrieval, LTR, semantic search, query understanding, entity recognition)
• Strong experience building large-scale ML systems in production
• Proven ability to lead technical direction and influence across teams
• Experience with online experimentation and metrics-driven development
• Strong programming skills in Python (Java/Go a plus)
• Experience with distributed systems and cloud platforms (AWS/GCP/Azure)
• Solid understanding of data fundamentals (SQL, pipelines, feature stores)
• Excellent communication skills and ability to work cross-functionally

Nice to Have

• Experience with recommender systems or personalization
• Experience with NLP techniques
• Familiarity with vector search / ANN (Faiss, ScaNN, etc.)
• Experience in streaming, marketplace, or content discovery platforms