Senior Staff Machine Learning Engineer, HelloFresh
Menu Personalisation
+ Virtual Stock Option and Restricted Stock Unit Plans
2-3 days a week in office
Recipe box subscription service
Posted today
Recipe box subscription service
1001+ employees
Posted today
+ Virtual Stock Option and Restricted Stock Unit Plans
2-3 days a week in office
1001+ employees
Company mission
HelloFresh is on a mission to change the way people eat, forever! They're collectively disrupting the food supply chain and the multi-trillion-dollar food tech industry.
Role
Who you are
- 8+ years building and operating production ML systems, with a track record of technical leadership at scale
- Architectural decisions in your past that held up over multiple years and influenced teams beyond your own
- Production experience with recommender systems or large-scale personalization is a strong plus
- Fluency across our data and ML stack (Python, Spark) and our backend and platform stack (Go, Kafka, Kubernetes), with hands-on experience across pipelines, model serving, and observability at scale
- Statistical literacy to design honest experiments and the judgment to know when a model is actually better versus when the metrics are lying to you
- Operational judgment to diagnose system misbehavior, find root causes, and ship systems you can debug under real load
- Hands-on experience with AI tooling (Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot) beyond casual experimentation; you use AI agents every day and have a practical sense of how the context you provide shapes output quality
- Product sense: opinionated about what should be built and why, with the ability to back it with evidence and translate it into business value
- A bias to ship; you take full ownership and finish the last twenty percent
What the job involves
- We are looking for a technical leader for the Menu Personalization ML systems, someone who owns the recommender stack that runs in production. You will set the direction for how we design, build, and operate the ML systems behind menu personalization, while staying hands-on across feature pipelines, training workflows, model serving, experimentation tooling, and the infrastructure underneath
- The decisions you make here shape the platform for years, not quarters, and you will be expected to hold a point of view on where personalization at HelloFresh should go and to back it with data and user evidence. You will partner with Data Scientists to take models from notebook to production, with Data Engineers on features and pipelines, with Backend Engineers on online inference paths, and with Product on what to build next
- Your influence will reach well beyond Menu Personalization: through the standards you set, the architectural decisions you make, the engineers you grow around you, and the company-wide initiatives you drive to advance ML and data engineering craft across HelloFresh
- Set the technical direction for the ML systems behind menu personalization, owning the end-to-end stack: feature pipelines, training workflows, model serving, experimentation tooling, and infrastructure
- Take research and experiments to reliable production systems, partnering with Data Scientists on services that meet real latency, scalability, and observability requirements
- Shape the personalization roadmap with Product and Engineering leadership, backing your point of view with data and user evidence
- Operate what you build, instrumenting and improving your systems in production because shipping is the beginning of the learning cycle, not the end of it
- Raise the technical bar across the team through architecture reviews, mentorship, and the example you set on production ML craft
- Shape long-term architecture and make platform decisions whose payoff plays out over years rather than quarters
- Drive engineering excellence beyond Menu Personalization by setting standards other ML and data teams adopt
- Sync with peers across HelloFresh on best practices and contribute to company-wide engineering initiatives that move the broader ML and data craft forward
Our take
The food space has seen significant disruption in the last few years, whether it's the rapid expansion of takeaway delivery, online groceries or meal boxes. Consumer tastes are changing and there has been lots of innovation to try and get quality food in front of people more easily. HelloFresh is one of the drivers of that trend.
On the back of a boom in subscriptions during the pandemic, HelloFresh secured its place in the new food market. However, the cost-of-living crisis has meant that the company and its peers have faced dwindling subscriptions, resulting in layoffs and a need to refocus towards a more sustainable future for the business.
That said, HelloFresh still benefits from being a leader in the sector and from its B Corporation status - properties that mean it remains a top option for consumers who want to try meal kits. Only time will tell if the company can sustain its success moving forwards, at a time when its product, however enticing, is becoming less affordable for the general public.
Kirsty
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
39% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 6 rounds)
Dec 2016
$97.1m
SERIES G
Sep 2015
$96.7m
SERIES F
Total funding: $405.1m
Company values
- Speed & Agility
- Relentless Prioritisation
- Egoless Environment
- Learning Never Stops
- Data Drivenness
- Customer Centricity
- Long Term Orientation
Company HQ
London, UK
Articles
Leadership
Dominik S. Richter
(CEO)Started his career at Goldman Sachs after graduating from WHU and LSE.
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