Software Engineer, Recommendation Systems

Meta Meta · Big Tech · New York, NY

Distinguished Engineer to define the future of recommendation systems at Meta, focusing on large-scale ranking, retrieval, and personalization infrastructure using AI-native approaches. This role involves setting technical direction, driving improvements in surfacing relevant content, and operating at the intersection of ML research and production engineering.

What you'd actually do

  1. Define and drive the multi-year technical vision for recommendation and ranking systems across Meta, influencing architecture decisions that span retrieval, candidate generation, feature engineering, and multi-objective ranking
  2. Identify and solve the hardest scalability and quality challenges in large-scale recommendation pipelines, including those that cross multiple systems or fall at abstraction boundaries
  3. Architect extensible, reliable ranking and personalization infrastructure that serves as a foundational platform for multiple product teams and engineering organizations
  4. Develop and apply novel machine learning techniques to recommendation problems, translating research advances into production systems that deliver measurable improvements in user engagement and satisfaction
  5. Define new metrics and experimentation frameworks for evaluating long-term recommendation quality, connecting them to organization-level priorities and business outcomes

Skills

Required

  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, relevant technical field, or equivalent practical experience
  • 12+ years of experience designing, building, and scaling production recommendation, ranking, or personalization systems
  • Experience defining technical strategy and architecture for large-scale machine learning systems, including retrieval, candidate generation, feature engineering, and multi-objective ranking
  • Experience leading cross-organizational engineering initiatives, including driving consensus across multiple teams and influencing technical direction at the organizational level
  • Experience developing and applying machine learning models at scale, from inception through production impact, including experimentation design and metric definition
  • Experience identifying and resolving systemic reliability, performance, or correctness issues across distributed machine learning and data infrastructure
  • Experience rearchitecting or rebuilding recommendation or ranking systems using AI-native approaches that delivered order-of-magnitude improvements in quality or efficiency
  • Proficiency with deep learning frameworks such as PyTorch or TensorFlow applied to large-scale embedding models, two-tower architectures, or sequential recommendation models
  • Track record of industry-recognized contributions to recommendation systems, information retrieval, or personalization through publications, patents, or open-source work
  • Experience building real-time feature serving, approximate nearest neighbor retrieval, or low-latency inference infrastructure for recommendation at internet scale

Nice to have

  • deep learning frameworks such as PyTorch or TensorFlow
  • large-scale embedding models
  • two-tower architectures
  • sequential recommendation models
  • real-time feature serving
  • approximate nearest neighbor retrieval
  • low-latency inference infrastructure

What the JD emphasized

  • 12+ years of experience designing, building, and scaling production recommendation, ranking, or personalization systems
  • Experience defining technical strategy and architecture for large-scale machine learning systems
  • Experience leading cross-organizational engineering initiatives
  • Experience developing and applying machine learning models at scale
  • Experience identifying and resolving systemic reliability, performance, or correctness issues across distributed machine learning and data infrastructure
  • Experience rearchitecting or rebuilding recommendation or ranking systems using AI-native approaches that delivered order-of-magnitude improvements in quality or efficiency
  • Track record of industry-recognized contributions to recommendation systems, information retrieval, or personalization through publications, patents, or open-source work

Other signals

  • recommendation systems
  • ranking systems
  • personalization infrastructure
  • AI-native approaches
  • machine learning research
  • production engineering