Senior Machine Learning Engineer
Taboola · Los Angeles, California, United States
About this role
**Senior Machine Learning Engineer — Taboola (R&D)** Join Taboola, a performance-driven advertising company and a proud **Great Place to Work® Certified** employer in the US. You’ll be part of the **R&D team in Downtown Los Angeles**, working on **recommendation and ranking algorithms** that power **Realize**, Taboola’s performance advertising platform serving **600M+ daily active users**. --- ## What you’ll do - Design and build **predictive customer behavior models** for targeting and personalization. - Implement ML/statistics algorithms for **prediction and optimization**, and deliver trained models to **production**. - Take **end-to-end ownership**: design, build, ship, measure, and maintain models and the services around them—rapidly prototyping and delivering projects using **AI-assisted “vibe coding”** workflows. - Act as a **Harness Engineer**: build evaluation harnesses, automated testing frameworks, benchmarks, and guardrails to help the team experiment, measure model quality, and ship safely (following a **TDD** process). - Present findings clearly and collaborate effectively across teams (including early morning/evening syncs with the **Tel Aviv** team). - Build and maintain pipelines to populate **HDFS/Hadoop** with logs from **Kafka** and data from **SQL production systems**. - Design, build, and support algorithms for **data transformation and computation** on **Hadoop, Spark**, and other distributed big data systems. --- ## To thrive in this role, you’ll need - **Bachelor’s or advanced degree** in a relevant field (ideally CS, Electrical Engineering, or Computational Economics). - **5+ years** hands-on experience with **Python and Java**. - Proficiency with ML frameworks such as **PyTorch** and/or **TensorFlow**. - Experience with **recommendation systems**, **ranking algorithms**, or **personalization at scale**. - Experience taking **end-to-end ownership** of ML systems (design → build → ship → measure → maintain), using AI-assisted coding tools (e.g., **Cursor, Claude, GitHub Copilot**). - Experience building **automated evaluation harnesses** and **test frameworks** (benchmarks, baselines, guardrails). - Ability to communicate technical findings clearly and collaborate across teams. --- ## Bonus points - Experience with **Karpathy’s autoresearch (MIT)**, **AutoML**, or other agentic tools for ML experiments. --- ## Why Taboola? - **Well-being:** comprehensive benefits (health, dental, vision, 401k matching), fully stocked kitchen, parking. - **Flexibility:** hybrid schedule with **3 days in-office** (option to come in more often). - Work with major publisher and advertiser partners (e.g., Yahoo, NBCU, ESPN, CBS; Wells Fargo, Honda, Pinterest, Expedia). --- ## Location & tags - **Downtown Los Angeles** - **#LI-RT1** - **#LI-Hybrid** --- ## Compensation (base salary range) **$138,500 — $195,000 USD** (may vary by location, skills, and experience). Perks may include discretionary bonus, equity, flexible PTO, medical/dental/vision insurance, competitive 401(k) match, paid parental leave, and more. Taboola is an equal opportunity employer and values diversity and inclusion.
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