Data First Jobs

Saicon

Machine Learning Engineer

Contract · In Office · Parsippany, New Jersey (USA)

Posted Sep 17, 2026

  • Position Overview
  • We are seeking an experienced Machine Learning Engineer to design and develop intelligent personalization and recommendation capabilities for consumer-facing applications and marketing initiatives.
  • This role will focus on using customer behavior, transactional activity, engagement signals, and other first-party data to create models that deliver more relevant experiences to individual consumers. The ideal candidate combines strong machine learning engineering fundamentals with hands-on experience developing recommendation, ranking, targeting, or personalization solutions at scale.
  • The position will work closely with engineering, data science, product, analytics, and marketing stakeholders to move models from experimentation through production deployment and ongoing optimization.
  • Key Responsibilities
  • Design, develop, and productionize machine learning models supporting recommendation, personalization, targeting, and next-best-action use cases.
  • Build solutions using techniques such as collaborative filtering, matrix factorization, learning-to-rank, neural networks, embeddings, and hybrid recommendation approaches.
  • Use behavioral, transactional, demographic, engagement, and other first-party data to improve the relevance of customer experiences.
  • Develop scalable ML solutions capable of processing large consumer datasets and supporting batch and real-time inference.
  • Partner with engineering teams to integrate machine learning models into applications, data pipelines, and customer engagement platforms.
  • Work with product, marketing, and analytics stakeholders to translate business objectives into measurable machine learning problems.
  • Establish appropriate evaluation frameworks for recommendation systems, including offline model metrics and business-oriented measures such as engagement, conversion, retention, and customer value.
  • Design and evaluate experiments, including A/B testing, to understand the real-world impact of personalization strategies.
  • Continuously monitor and improve model accuracy, performance, scalability, and relevance.
  • Explore emerging approaches including contextual bandits, reinforcement learning, graph-based recommendation techniques, and advanced deep-learning architectures.
  • Evaluate opportunities to incorporate large language models (LLMs) and agentic AI techniques into recommendation and personalization workflows.
  • Contribute to ML engineering standards and best practices around model development, deployment, monitoring, experimentation, and reproducibility.
  • Required Qualifications
  • 5+ years of professional experience in machine learning, data science, or ML engineering, with meaningful experience developing recommendation or personalization systems.
  • Hands-on experience building recommendation, ranking, targeting, or next-best-action models used in production environments.
  • Strong Python development skills and experience with machine learning frameworks such as PyTorch, TensorFlow, or comparable technologies.
  • Strong knowledge of recommendation-system concepts and algorithms, including collaborative filtering, matrix factorization, embeddings, neural networks, ranking models, and hybrid approaches.
  • Experience working with large-scale behavioral, transactional, customer, or marketing datasets.
  • Demonstrated ability to evaluate machine learning solutions using both technical model metrics and measurable business outcomes.
  • Experience deploying and operating machine learning workloads in cloud-based environments.
  • Hands-on experience with AWS and Databricks.
  • Understanding of modern LLM architectures and agentic AI frameworks, including how these technologies can be adapted or incorporated into recommendation and personalization solutions.
  • Strong analytical and problem-solving skills with the ability to independently investigate complex data and modeling challenges.
  • Strong communication skills and the ability to collaborate effectively with both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
  • Preferred Experience
  • Previous experience within e-commerce, retail, digital media, consumer technology, marketing technology, or another high-volume consumer environment.
  • Experience with customer segmentation, audience targeting, marketing analytics, or customer data platforms.
  • Experience designing or analyzing controlled experiments and A/B tests.
  • Familiarity with real-time model serving and low-latency recommendation architectures.
  • Experience with contextual bandits, reinforcement learning, graph neural networks, or other advanced recommendation techniques.
  • Experience applying LLMs, generative AI, or AI agents to personalization or customer-engagement use cases.
  • Ideal Candidate
  • The strongest candidate will be more than a general-purpose machine learning engineer. They will have direct experience building recommendation or personalization systems and will understand how model design decisions ultimately affect customer behavior and business outcomes.
  • They should be comfortable moving between experimentation and production engineering, working with large and imperfect consumer datasets, and explaining why a particular modeling approach is appropriate for a given recommendation problem.

Mention you found this on Data First Jobs — it helps us bring you more roles like this.

Machine Learning Engineer

Saicon

Like this role? Get carefully selected jobs like it, twice a week, straight to your inbox.

Free, no spam. Unsubscribe anytime.