Staff Machine Learning Engineer - Applied AI

Uber
San Francisco, CA, USA / Seattle, WA, USA / Sunnyvale, CA, USA2025-07-03

About the job

We are building AI-native discovery experiences across Mobility and Delivery. Search, recommendations, and conversational AI are central to how millions of users discover rides, restaurants, grocery items, and retail products every day. We are hiring a Staff ML Engineer (IC6) to define and lead the foundation model strategy powering these experiences. At this level, you will not just build models — you will shape technical direction across teams, influence product strategy, and deliver measurable impact at global scale.

Responsibilities

- Own the end-to-end technical strategy for foundation models across Search, Recommendations, and Conversational AI.

- Drive architecture decisions that influence multiple product surfaces (Eats, Grocery, Retail, Mobility).

- Lead cross-team initiatives spanning Retrieval, Ranking, Personalization, and LLM-powered assistants.

- Define long-term investment areas (build vs fine-tune vs partner models).

- Mentor senior engineers and act as a technical multiplier across the org.

Qualifications

Minimum

- Masters degree or Ph.D in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics

- 8+ years of ML experience, including significant work on large-scale deep learning systems.

- Demonstrated ownership of high-impact ML systems in search, recommendations, or conversational AI.

- Deep expertise in transformers, retrieval systems, ranking, and embedding architectures.

- Strong experience with PyTorch and distributed training .

- Track record of influencing technical direction across teams.

- Strong product intuition and ability to connect model improvements to business outcomes.

Preferred

- Experience leading multi-team ML initiatives.

- Defined long-term technical roadmaps adopted across orgs.

- Elevated engineering standards through mentorship and technical leadership.