Quizlet · 6 hours ago
Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Personalization & Recommendations
San Francisco, CA
Full-time
Hybrid
Lead/Staff
$190K/yr - $274K/yr
8+ years expQuizlet is a leading learning platform dedicated to helping every learner achieve their outcomes effectively. They are seeking a Staff Machine Learning Engineer to design and build large-scale retrieval, ranking, and recommendation systems that enhance the learning experience for users. The role involves collaborating with various teams to ensure personalized learning pathways that drive engagement and satisfaction.
E-LearningEdTechEducationInternetKnowledge Management
Responsibilities
Design and implement personalization models across candidate retrieval, ranking, and post-ranking layers, leveraging user embeddings, contextual signals, and content features
Develop scalable retrieval and serving systems using architectures such as Two-Tower, deep ranking, and ANN-based vector search for real-time personalization across surfaces
Build and maintain model training, evaluation, and deployment pipelines, ensuring reliability, training–serving consistency, and robust monitoring
Partner closely with Product and Data Science to translate learner objectives (engagement, retention, mastery) into measurable modeling goals and experimentation plans
Advance evaluation methodologies, refining offline metrics (e.g., NDCG, CTR, calibration) and supporting rigorous A/B testing to measure learner and business impact
Collaborate with platform and infrastructure teams to optimize distributed training, inference latency, and serving cost at scale
Contribute to the long-term technical vision for personalization and recommendations, aligning modeling strategy with Quizlet’s AI and product roadmaps
Stay current with RecSys research and industry trends, bringing relevant advances from top conferences (KDD, WSDM, SIGIR, RecSys, NeurIPS) into production
Mentor other engineers and applied scientists, fostering technical growth, experimentation rigor, and responsible ML practices
Champion collaboration, inclusion, and curiosity, helping build a team culture that values diverse perspectives and data-driven problem-solving
Qualification
Required
8+ years of experience in applied machine learning or ML-heavy software engineering, with a strong focus on personalization, ranking, or recommendation systems
Track record of measurable impact, improving key online metrics such as CTR, retention, or engagement through recommender or search systems in production
Strong hands-on skills in Python and PyTorch, with expertise in data and feature engineering, distributed training and inference on GPUs, and familiarity with modern MLOps practices — including model registries, feature stores, monitoring, and drift detection
Deep understanding of retrieval and ranking architectures, including Two-Tower models, deep cross networks, Transformers, or MMoE, and how to apply them in production contexts
Experience with large-scale embedding models and vector search (e.g., FAISS, ScaNN), including training, serving, and optimization at scale
Proficiency in experiment design and evaluation, connecting offline metrics (AUC, NDCG, calibration) with online A/B test results to drive product decisions
Ability to communicate complex technical ideas clearly, collaborating effectively with product managers, data scientists, and engineers across teams
Growth and mentorship mindset, contributing to team learning and helping raise the bar for modeling quality, experimentation, and reliability
Commitment to responsible and inclusive personalization, ensuring our ML systems respect learner privacy, fairness, and diverse goals
Preferred
Publications or open-source contributions in RecSys, search, or ranking
Familiarity with reinforcement learning for recommendations or contextual bandits
Experience with hybrid RecSys systems blending collaborative filtering, content understanding, and LLM-based reasoning
Prior work in consumer or EdTech applications with personalization at scale
Benefits
20 vacation days that we expect you to take!
Competitive health, dental, and vision insurance (100% employee and 75% dependent PPO, Dental, VSP Choice)
Employer-sponsored 401k plan with company match
Access to LinkedIn Learning and other resources to support professional growth
Paid Family Leave, FSA, HSA, Commuter benefits, and Wellness benefits
40 hours of annual paid time off to participate in volunteer programs of choice
Company
Quizlet
Quizlet is a learning platform that uses activities and games to help students practice and master what they’re learning.
201-500 employees
H1B Sponsorship
Quizlet has a track record of offering H1B sponsorships. Please note that this does not
guarantee sponsorship for this specific role. Below presents additional info for your
reference. (Data Powered by US Department of Labor)
Distribution of Different Job Fields Receiving Sponsorship
Represents job field similar to this job
Trends of Total Sponsorships
2025 (12)
2024 (10)
2023 (7)
2022 (9)
2021 (1)
2020 (8)
Funding
Current Stage
Growth StageTotal Funding
$62MKey Investors
General AtlanticIcon Ventures
2020-05-13Series C· $30M
2018-02-06Series B· $20M
2015-11-23Series A· $12M
Leadership Team
Kurt Beidler
Chief Executive Officer
David Margulius
Board Member and Co-Founder
Recent News
2025-10-31
South Africa Today
2025-09-12
Mark Cuban Foundation
2025-09-09
Company data provided by crunchbase