Senior Staff Machine Learning Engineer , Patreon

• You’re a senior technical leader who thrives in building systems from 0→1
• You’re deeply familiar with the challenges of scaling search and recommendation models, and you enjoy operating at the intersection of modeling, systems, and product
• You have experience bringing ML models to production at scale — and you care just as much about how they impact users as how they perform in offline metrics
• You communicate clearly, love mentoring, and are motivated by building systems that empower creators
• 8+ years of professional experience in applied machine learning, with a focus on search, ranking, or recommendation systems
• Proven experience designing and deploying production ML systems serving millions of users
• Strong programming skills in Python
• Proficiency in backend development and experience integrating ML systems into production environments
• Ability to prototype or visualize ML outputs in interactive UI contexts to help teams interpret model impact
• Expertise in building and maintaining data pipelines, feature stores, and model observability systems
• Deep understanding of embedding-based retrieval, ranking algorithms, and personalization architectures
• Strong collaboration skills — able to partner effectively with engineers, designers, and PMs
• Experience mentoring senior engineers and driving cross-team technical alignment
• Master’s or PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or related field, or equivalent experience
• We hire talented and passionate people from different backgrounds because workplace diversity and inclusion is critical to our ability to serve creators worldwide. If you’re excited about a role but your past experience doesn’t match with every bullet point outlined above, we strongly encourage you to apply anyway. If you’re a creator at heart, are energized by our mission, and share our company values, we’d love to hear from you

Desirable

• We're continuing to invest heavily in building the best creator platform with the best team in the creator economy and are looking for a Senior Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Relevance to support our mission
• As a Senior Staff Machine Learning Engineer in Relevance, you’ll define and lead the technical direction for Patreon’s recommendation and search systems
• You’ll architect large-scale ML systems that determine what fans see, how they discover creators, and how creators grow their audiences
• You’ll own projects from prototype to production, including the data, modeling, and backend components
• You’ll also build tools and simple frontend prototypes to visualize model results and demonstrate how relevance models surface in the product
• This ability to show how ML decisions appear in the user experience is key to how we connect technical work to creator impact
• You’ll mentor other ML engineers, influence multi-team technical strategy, and collaborate with cross-functional leaders across Product, Data Science, and Infrastructure
• Your work will define the standards and systems that future ML teams at Patreon build upon
• Design and build large-scale ranking, search, and recommendation systems that power discovery across the platform
• Architect and productionize end-to-end ML pipelines (data ingestion, feature generation, model training, evaluation, deployment, and monitoring)
• Prototype model behavior including frontend to visualize results and collaborate effectively with product and design partners
• Develop embedding systems and retrieval models that serve millions of users in real time
• Establish and evolve ML observability and performance monitoring for relevance metrics
• Partner with cross-functional leaders to align on roadmap, goals, and impact
• Mentor and guide engineers, fostering a high bar for technical excellence and experimentation