Senior Software Engineer, Machine Learning (commerce)

Discord Discord · Consumer · San Francisco, CA · Machine Learning

Senior Machine Learning Engineer to join the Revenue ML team, focusing on commerce discovery and personalization for Discord's 1P Shop and Game Commerce platform. The role involves building recommendation and marketing targeting systems from scratch, leveraging Discord's social graph for social commerce features, and driving A/B testing and model monitoring. Requires strong experience in applied deep learning, recommendation systems, and real-time ML serving infrastructure.

What you'd actually do

  1. Architect and own the ML foundations for commerce discovery: user, item, and interaction embeddings that power personalized recommendations across shop surfaces (homepage, cart, post-purchase, wishlist, and more).
  2. Design and deploy scalable real-time recommendation and ranking systems that support a growing catalog of 1P and 3P items across heterogeneous game publisher inventories.
  3. Build ML-powered marketing targeting systems that identify the right users for the right campaigns — new buyer discounts, drop campaigns, weekly deals, and seasonal promotions — driving conversion without conditioning users to wait for discounts.
  4. Leverage Discord's unique social graph to build social commerce ML: gifting recipient prediction, group buying conversion modeling, and friend-group recommendations that differentiate Discord from traditional game storefronts.
  5. Drive deep learning A/B testing infrastructure and model monitoring to translate experimentation results into actionable product decisions.

Skills

Required

  • 4+ years of experience as a Machine Learning Engineer
  • track record of owning and shipping recommendation or personalization systems end-to-end
  • Deep expertise in applied deep learning — particularly embedding models, two-tower architectures, and retrieval/ranking systems for e-commerce or content recommendation.
  • Strong proficiency in Python
  • deep learning frameworks (PyTorch preferred)
  • Experience building and operating real-time ML serving infrastructure at scale, including feature stores, model serving, and A/B testing frameworks.
  • Demonstrated ability to work in early-stage, high-ambiguity environments and build ML systems from the ground up, not just improve existing ones.
  • Experience translating ML evaluation metrics and experiment results into product roadmap decisions and business impact.
  • Strong cross-functional instincts — you're comfortable partnering with product, engineering, data science, and business stakeholders to align on priorities and drive execution.

Nice to have

  • Experience applying graph ML or social network signals (social affinities, community behavior) to recommendation or personalization problems.
  • Familiarity with personalized marketing systems: lifecycle targeting, audience segmentation, and campaign optimization.
  • Familiarity with loyalty, rewards, or incentive programs

What the JD emphasized

  • building systems from the ground up
  • track record of owning and shipping recommendation or personalization systems end-to-end
  • build ML systems from the ground up, not just improve existing ones

Other signals

  • building systems from the ground up
  • founding ML voice
  • high-impact, high-leverage role
  • ML-powered products