Senior Machine Learning Engineer I, Recommendations
Published | December 22, 2022 |
Location | Brooklyn, United States of America |
Category | Machine Learning |
Job Type | Full-time |
Description

Company Description
Etsy is the global marketplace for unique and creative goods. We build, power, and evolve the tools and technologies that connect millions of entrepreneurs with millions of buyers around the world. As an Etsy Inc. employee – whether a team member of Etsy, Reverb, Depop, or Elo7 – you’ll tackle unique, meaningful, and large-scale problems alongside passionate coworkers, all the while making a rewarding impact and Keeping Commerce Human.
Job Description
What’s the role?
We are looking for a Sr. Software Engineer to join the Recommendations team in order to better understand Etsy’s unique inventory and enable personalized recommendations and ranked content for product teams across Etsy.
Our aim is to present recommendations of the best of Etsy’s inventory. As an engineer on our team, you will play a major role in improving the shopping experience for millions of Etsy buyers. We’re a cross-functional group of engineers, data scientists, product managers, designers, and researchers.
This is a full-time position reporting to the Recommendations Engineering Manager and the base salary range will be 164,000 - 192,000 USD per year. In addition to salary, you will also be eligible for an equity package, an annual performance bonus, and our competitive benefits that support you and your family as part of your total rewards package at Etsy. For this role, we are considering candidates based in the U.S. who are either remote, flex, or office-based. Etsy offers different work modes to meet the variety of needs and preferences of our team. Learn more about our flexible work options and vaccination policy here.
What's this team like at Etsy?
With your help, we are giving our buyers better tools to find what they are looking for and to help them form a connection with our sellers. In this role, you will put your skills to use by helping us improve the ranking and suggestions of localized results through machine learning systems. You will join a dedicated team of engineers to collaborate on all of these projects. Exhibiting empathy, communication, and technical skill are all valued equally.
Here’s a taste of the problems we’re solving:
- How can we help someone find that perfect item, even when they don’t know what they’re looking for?
- How can the recommendations experience make Etsy come to life and feel as vibrant as the community of makers that’s behind it?
- How can we understand buyers’ motives and interests to personalize their experience?
- How can we help buyers to explore the breadth of Etsy's inventory?
Our production systems rely on Scala, Java, Python, PHP, and JavaScript; we are proud to have an engineering culture that encourages career growth and learning. You can learn more about our philosophies, tools, and some of the challenges we’ve been solving at Building a Platform for Serving Recommendations on our Engineering blog, Code as Craft.
What does the day-to-day look like?
- Build solutions to help buyers discover items for their personalized shopping missions.
- Contribute at all levels of Etsy’s Recommendations stack, ranging from application interfaces to the serving layer.
- Work cross-functionally with various engineering teams (e.g. machine learning infrastructure, data analysts, search experience), participating in design, prioritization, and implementation.
- Provide detailed and constructive design and code reviews.
- Of course, this is just a sample of the kinds of work this role will require! You should assume that your role will encompass other tasks, too, and that your job duties and responsibilities may change from time to time at Etsy's discretion, or otherwise applicable with local law.
Qualifications
Qualities that will help you thrive in this role:
- Have solid software engineering and coding skills, including CS fundamentals like data structures and algorithms and able to turn ideas into deeply reliable and well-tested code with an eye towards maintainability.
- Have extensive professional experience with Scala and objective-oriented programming languages like Java, Python, etc.
- Have experience building large-scale, low-latency distributed systems and building production recommendations, search, advertising, or general e-commerce systems.
- Possess experience within a machine learning environment at scale and have some familiarity with or are excited to learn about machine learning and related frameworks (like PySpark, Spark, etc).
- Are comfortable collaborating with Machine Learning Scientists, Product Managers, Data Analysts, and Designers to ensure that you’re delivering impactful product features while acting as an advocate for end-users.
- Are an analytical problem solver and understand how to wield data to make informed decisions about your work.
- Strong verbal and written communication skills.
- A trust in and commitment to Etsy’s vision, mission, and values.
Additional Information
What's Next
If you're interested in joining the team at Etsy, please share your resume with us and feel free to include a cover letter if you'd like. As we hope you've seen already, Etsy is a place that values individuality and variety. We don't want you to be like everyone else -- we want you to be like you! So tell us what you're all about.
Our Promise
At Etsy, we believe that a diverse, equitable and inclusive workplace furthers relevance, resilience, and longevity. We encourage people from all backgrounds, ages, abilities, and experiences to apply. Etsy is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace and is an affirmative action employer. We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity or Veteran status. If, due to a disability, you need an accommodation during any part of the interview process, please let your recruiter know. While Etsy supports visa sponsorship, sponsorship opportunities may be limited to certain roles and skills.
For U.S. roles only:
Many Etsy roles are open to remote candidates, and you'll be able to identify which ones within the location header of each job description. We're open to remote hires from all U.S. states except Hawaii and Alaska.