Junior AI/ML Engineer

Job Description

Job Description

What We Do

CarParts.com is the go-to eCommerce platform for auto care and maintenance. We provide drivers with quality parts at competitive prices and enable them to schedule appointments with trusted mechanics directly through our website. Using world-class design principles and the latest technologies, we deliver a fast, intuitive digital experience backed by our company-owned national distribution network. 

With over 1,000 employees worldwide, we are scaling rapidly, fueled by our most recent strategic partnership and $35 million investment.  This positions us for the next phase of growth as we continue to empower drivers along their journey.

Our Culture

At CarParts.com, our culture goes beyond our core values of Safety First, Customer Focused, and Commitment to Excellence. We are a performance-driven, data-focused, and fast-paced team where results matter and winning is expected.

- Hungry & Hardworking: We set ambitious goals, measure progress with clear metrics, and hold ourselves accountable to deliver results. 
- Promote from Within: We reward top performers with opportunities for growth and advancement. 
- Collaborative & In-Person: We believe the best ideas and fastest execution happen face-to-face. 
- High Standards: We move quickly, pay attention to details, and dig deep - whether it’s analyzing contracts, aggregating complex scenarios, or building clear, data-driven presentations. 
- No Passengers: We value grit, ownership, and the relentless pursuit of results

Summary of Role/Position

We are looking for an AI/ML Engineer to join our team and play a key role in building, deploying, and advancing our machine learning and AI systems. This person will work cross-functionally to design, train, and ship models and agentic AI pipelines that power areas such as search, recommendations, content generation, customer segmentation, and conversational AI, owning the work end to end from SQL and data preparation through production deployment.YOU WILL:

• Design, train, evaluate, and deploy machine learning and deep learning models (e.g., ranking, retrieval, embeddings, NER, classification) that power search, recommendations, and other product experiences
• Build and maintain agentic AI pipelines that orchestrate LLMs, tools, and retrieval to automate data enrichment, content generation, and internal workflows
• Write efficient SQL and Python to build training datasets, features, and evaluation sets from large-scale clickstream, catalog, and transaction data
• Own the full model lifecycle: version code and models in GitHub, automate training and deployment through Jenkins CI/CD pipelines, and monitor model quality in production
• Collaborate with engineering, product, and marketing teams to integrate models and AI services into production systems
• Evaluate model performance with offline metrics and online A/B tests, and iterate based on results
• Stay current with advancements in AI/ML, including LLMs, agents, and representation learning, and identify opportunities to apply emerging techniques

YOU MUST HAVE:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Statistics, Mathematics, or a related quantitative field with 2 years of professional experience in data science, machine learning, or a related role, or a Master's degree in one of those fields
• Strong ML fundamentals: supervised and unsupervised learning, loss functions and optimization, regularization, evaluation metrics, and experiment design
• Hands-on deep learning experience training and fine-tuning models with PyTorch; familiarity with Hugging Face Transformers, TensorFlow, or similar frameworks

• Proficiency in Python and SQL, including writing and optimizing queries over large datasets
• Proficiency with Git and GitHub workflows (branching, pull requests, code review) and CI/CD tools such as Jenkins for automated testing, training, and deployment
• Experience building LLM-based or agentic AI pipelines (prompt design, tool use, RAG, evaluation)
• Experience working with large datasets and cloud platforms (e.g., Databricks, AWS, GCP)
• Good communication skills and ability to explain technical findings to non-technical stakeholders
• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Data Analytics, Statistics, Marketing, Business Analytics, or a related quantitative field

NICE TO HAVE:

• Experience with e-commerce or retail product data
• Experience with search and retrieval systems (e.g., OpenSearch/Elasticsearch, vector search, learning-to-rank)
• Familiarity with MLOps tooling (e.g., MLflow, Docker, model serving and monitoring) and agent frameworks (e.g., LangGraph, MCP)
• Experience with end-to-end model development, from prototyping to production

A reasonable salary estimate based on education, experience, and geographic location is: $105,000-$115,000

Equal Opportunity Employer

CarParts.com is an equal-opportunity employer. We enthusiastically accept our responsibility to make employment decisions without regard to race, religious creed, color, age, sex, sexual orientation, national origin, religion, marital status, medical condition, physical or mental disability, military service, pregnancy, childbirth and related medical conditions, or any other classification protected by federal, state, and local laws and ordinances. Our management is dedicated to ensuring that we fulfill this policy with respect to hiring, placement, promotion, transfer, demotion, layoff, termination, recruitment advertising, pay, and other forms of compensation, training, and general treatment during employment.

 

The above-noted job description is not intended to describe, in detail, the multitude of tasks that may be assigned but rather to give the incumbent a general sense of the responsibilities and expectations of his/her position. As the nature of business demands change so, too, may the essential functions of this position.