[Remote] Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Recommendation

Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Sekai is building an AI-driven consumer platform for interactive content and is seeking a Senior Machine Learning Engineer to own search and recommendation systems for their product. The role involves building models and systems for content discovery, user engagement, and content distribution, focusing on improving recommendation quality and collaborating with product, data, and engineering teams.ResponsibilitiesBuild and improve recommendation and search systems across feed, discovery, search, and content continuation surfacesOwn retrieval and ranking systems, including candidate generation, embedding-based retrieval, two-tower models, ranking features, and online serving qualityDesign, launch, and analyze recommendation/search experiments end-to-end, then use the data to iterate quicklyImprove recommendation quality for new users, new content, and fast-changing content poolsBuild user, content, creator, and session-level representations from behavioral signalsPartner with product, data, and engineering teams to define metrics, run experiments, and ship measurable improvements to retention, engagement, and content distributionBuild practical ML systems that can move from prototype to production quickly, with clear monitoring and evaluationHelp shape the long-term ML architecture for AI-native content discoverySkills5+ years of industry experience building production ML systems, with senior-level ownership of recommendation, search, ranking, ads ranking, feed ranking, or content discovery systemsHands-on experience building recommendation or search systems for consumer appsExperience working on entertainment, social, gaming, short-form content, creator, or other engagement-driven consumer productsStrong practical experience with two-tower models, embedding retrieval, candidate generation, ranking, and online/offline evaluationStrong product intuition around relevance, retention, engagement, satisfaction, cold start, and content distributionAbility to translate messy user behavior into useful modeling signals and practical product improvementsStrong engineering fundamentals across modeling, data pipelines, backend integration, experimentation, and production ML systemsHigh ownership, fast execution, and clear communication in ambiguous product environmentsExperience with AI recommendation, LLM-powered ranking, semantic search, personalized generation, or AI-native content understandingExperience with UGC content ecosystems, creator marketplaces, or rapidly changing content catalogsExperience with multimodal content understanding across text, image, video, interaction traces, or generated contentExperience with explore/exploit, contextual bandits, reinforcement learning, or long-term value optimizationStartup experience or experience building 0-to-1 ML systems with limited infrastructureBenefitsTop compensation package, including competitive salary and meaningful equity.Remote-first team.Comprehensive health insurance and benefits.Company OverviewSekai is an AI-powered interactive content platform that enables users to create, play, remix, and share mini-apps without coding. It was founded in 2023, and is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, USA, with a workforce of 11-50 employees. Its website is https://sekaiapp.com.Company H1B SponsorshipSekai has a track record of offering H1B sponsorships, with 3 in 2025. Please note that this does not guarantee sponsorship for this specific role.