Senior Machine Learning Engineer - Ads

About Quora

Quora is a private, remote-first company dedicated to expanding collective intelligence worldwide. It operates two major platforms: Quora, a global knowledge-sharing site with millions of users each month, and Poe, an AI chat and language model platform integrating cutting-edge models like GPT-5.6-Sol and Claude-Fable-5.

The company fosters a culture emphasizing transparency, collaboration, and innovation, encouraging employees to share ideas, experiment, and iterate rapidly. Quora’s engineering teams have considerable impact on products, revenue, and growth.

This role is part of the Quora product team focused on advertising monetization, responsible for enhancing ad targeting, ranking, auction mechanics, and quality metrics. The team enjoys autonomy and quick deployment cycles.

Role and Responsibilities

• Design and enhance ads ranking models focusing on click-through rate (CTR), conversion rate (CVR) predictions, user-history representations, feature interactions, and model calibration.
• Own the full machine learning system lifecycle, including data pipelines, feature engineering, training data creation, model evaluation, training, deployment, and ongoing maintenance.
• Apply advanced deep learning and recommendation system techniques to improve ad rankings while adhering to latency, reliability, and operational cost constraints.
• Work closely with machine learning platform and product engineering teams to develop scalable production ML systems.
• Collaborate with product, data science, and engineering teams to establish ranking goals, design A/B tests, and measure impacts on advertiser outcomes, revenue, and user experience.
• Explore new machine learning applications to enhance different aspects of the Ads product to add user and advertiser value.

Qualifications

• Must be available for meetings during Quora’s coordination hours (Monday–Friday, 9 AM to 3 PM Pacific Time).
• Minimum 4 years of experience in professional software development focusing on machine learning.
• Proven experience developing and deploying large-scale ads ranking models with ownership of production enhancements, including CTR and CVR prediction and calibration.
• Expertise in evaluating ranking models through both offline metrics and online experiments and understanding discrepancies between them and business metrics.
• Proficient using AI-assisted developer tools for coding, testing, and analysis, with the ability to critically assess generated outputs.
• Hands-on experience implementing deep learning models with frameworks such as PyTorch or TensorFlow.
• Strong mathematical understanding of machine learning algorithms.
• Advanced Python programming skills with a focus on writing maintainable production-level ML code.
• Bachelor’s, Master’s, or PhD degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related technical fields.

Preferred Experience

• Familiarity with modern ranking model architectures like feature interaction networks, attention-based user sequence models, and multi-task learning approaches.
• Knowledge of how ad ranking predictions and calibrations affect bidding, auctions, and advertiser results.
• Leadership experience overseeing large-scale machine learning projects involving multiple engineers.
• Handling ranking challenges, including sparse or delayed conversion data, sampling biases, cold start problems, and serving-training inconsistencies.
• Experience with generative recommender systems.
• Excellent communication and leadership abilities.
• Strong alignment with Quora’s mission to grow global knowledge.

Additional Information

The position is a backfill for an existing role with ongoing applications accepted. Quora provides extensive benefits including medical coverage, equity, remote work reimbursements, paid leave, and employee support programs that vary by country.

US-based candidates can expect salaries ranging from $189,507 to $274,604 USD annually plus equity and benefits. Canadian candidates in Toronto and Vancouver have a salary range between $243,330 and $282,076 CAD, while other Canadian locations range from $227,108 to $263,271 CAD, also with equity and benefits.

Quora is an equal opportunity employer valuing diversity and encourages applications from underrepresented groups. AI tools may support processing applications, but all hiring decisions are made by humans. Final candidates will undergo identity and background verification before onboarding.