Senior Machine Learning Engineer
AI summary of the role
Senior ML engineer at The Washington Post building production AI/ML systems for journalism, including Ask The Post, search, retrieval, ranking, recommendation, and generative AI reader experiences.
What you’ll do
- Design, build, deploy, and operate production ML systems across generative AI, search, Revenue Science and Personalization.
- Partner with Applied Research Scientists to translate research models and prototypes into scalable, reliable, and maintainable production systems.
- Design and build high-throughput, low-latency ranking and retrieval services for real-time personalization, recommendation, search, and intelligent discovery.
- Build and evolve reusable AI/ML platform capabilities for model training, feature generation, experimentation, deployment, inference, model versioning, and monitoring.
What you’ll bring
- 5+ years of experience in machine learning engineering, software engineering, or building large-scale production ML systems.
- Strong programming skills in Python and experience with a production language such as C++, Java, Go, Scala, or Rust.
- Hands-on experience with PyTorch or another modern machine learning framework and deploying deep learning models into production.
- Experience building search, retrieval, ranking, recommendation, GenAI, or related machine learning systems.
Technologies
Python · C++ · Java · Go · Scala · Rust · PyTorch · Kubernetes · Docker · CI/CD · AWS · GCP
About The Washington Post
Major national newspaper and digital news publisher, plus Arc XP — a B2B CMS/digital experience platform licensed to 2,500+ media sites worldwide.
Private Late · 1000–2000 people
Source and classification
Internal deployment & tooling · Evidence for this classification:
Join the future of news We’re on a mission to deliver riveting storytelling for all of America. At The Washington Post, you’ll help reinvent news. Our work is driven by a deep investigative spirit and enhanced by innovation to bring audiences closer to the stories that matter most. About Our Team The Washington Post is powered by the passion and talent of our people. It takes all of us to reinvent news. Beyond our award-winning News and Opinions teams, we work across many departments, including Brand & Events, Communications, Customer Care, Engineering & Product, Finance, Human Resources, Legal, Marketing & Advertising, Print Operations, and Sales. Why This Role Matters As a senior machine learning engineer, you will design, build, and scale production AI/ML systems that power the next generation of journalism. This role will focus on AI/ML platforms, Ask The Post, search,
More from the job description
Join the future of news We’re on a mission to deliver riveting storytelling for all of America. At The Washington Post, you’ll help reinvent news. Our work is driven by a deep investigative spirit and enhanced by innovation to bring audiences closer to the stories that matter most. About Our Team The Washington Post is powered by the passion and talent of our people. It takes all of us to reinvent news. Beyond our award-winning News and Opinions teams, we work across many departments, including Brand & Events, Communications, Customer Care, Engineering & Product, Finance, Human Resources, Legal, Marketing & Advertising, Print Operations, and Sales. Why This Role Matters As a senior machine learning engineer, you will design, build, and scale production AI/ML systems that power the next generation of journalism. This role will focus on AI/ML platforms, Ask The Post, search, retrieval, ranking, recommendation, and generative AI-powered reader experiences. You will work at the intersection of machine learning and software engineering, translating advanced AI/ML research into scalable, low-latency, reliable production systems that serve The Post’s journalism, readers, and business goals. What Motivates You You value world-class journalism and want to build technology that strengthens that mission. You enjoy turning promising machine learning research and prototypes into sc [... source excerpt omitted ...] fficiency. You communicate clearly, collaborate well, and thrive in a feedback-driven engineering environment. How You’ll Support The Mission Design, build, deploy, and operate production ML systems across generative AI, search, Revenue Science and Personalization. Partner with Applied Research Scientists to translate research models and prototypes into scalable, reliable, and maintainable production systems. Design and build high-throughput, low-latency ranking and retrieval services supporting real-time personalization, recommendation, search, and intelligent discovery. Build and evolve reusable AI/ML platform capabilities for model training, feature generation, experimenta [... source excerpt omitted ...] serving for latency, throughput, reliability, and cost using techniques such as batching, caching, quantization, distillation, and hardware-aware optimization. Build and operate production systems for semantic and hybrid search, vector retrieval, retrieval-augmented generation, recommendation, and agentic AI workflows. Establish strong ML observability across model quality, data and feature health, latency, throughput, failures, and resource utilization. Provide technical leadership through system design, architecture reviews, mentoring, and shaping the technical roadmap for AI/ML platforms and production systems. The Skills and Experience You Bring Bachelor’s degree or great
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