Staff Machine Learning Scientist – Personalization

Bertelsmann SE & Co. KGaA

Staff Machine Learning Scientist leading the development of personalization products for Penguin Random House. Focus on recommender systems and customer engagement across digital platforms.

Posted 7/7/2026full-timeRemote • 🇺🇸 United StatesLead💰 $210,000 - $250,000 per yearWebsite

Tech Stack

Tools & technologies

AWSCloudDockerKubernetesPythonPyTorchSQLTensorflow

About the role

Key responsibilities & impact

Define and drive the technical roadmap for personalization and recommender systems, prioritizing roadmap items to meet business goals and defining short-term vision for the team.
Propose and deliver R&D that directly shapes roadmaps, multiple projects, and long-term deliverables. Models are used over the long term by multiple products and teams.
Design and lead the development of software used by multiple teams, ensuring long-term maintainability, scalability, and adaptability.
Ensure complex, multi-service personalization products meet SLAs and provide correct results over time.
Adapt systems to changing business needs and resolve multi-product, multi-team service incidents.
Establish and enforce experimentation best practices, including A/B testing frameworks, offline evaluation methodology, and metrics design across personalization surfaces.
Lead team meetings, ensure the team's progress on the roadmap, and make technical decisions that unblock projects.
Manage stakeholders' expectations with data-driven narratives and communicate effectively with senior leadership to align on strategy and track progress.
Drive organizational efficiency and business impact by implementing new technologies and processes.
Foster a collaborative and high-performance team culture.
Mentor senior and mid-level scientists, setting high code quality standards and best practices for the team.
Stay current with advances in recommender systems, LLMs for personalization, and representation learning, bringing relevant advances into production when they deliver measurable improvement.

Requirements

What you’ll need

PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Engineering, Operations Research, Statistics, or a related quantitative field, OR Master's with 8+ years of applied ML experience.
Deep expertise in recommender systems, personalization, ranking/retrieval, or computational advertising, with a track record of shipping systems that operate at scale.
Expert-level Python and deep proficiency with modern ML frameworks (PyTorch or TensorFlow) and recommendation-specific tooling (e.g., NVTabular, Merlin, Triton).
Strong experience with cloud-based ML infrastructure (AWS, Kubernetes, Databricks), containerization (Docker), and model serving at low latency.
Advanced SQL skills and experience architecting large-scale data pipelines and feature stores.
Demonstrated ability to define technical roadmaps, influence direction across teams, and make architectural decisions that hold up over time.
Excellent communication skills with the ability to present complex technical work to executive and non-technical audiences.

Benefits

Comp & perks

Medical/Prescription drug insurance
Dental
Vision
Health Care/Dependent Care Flexible Spending Account
Health Savings Account
Pre-Tax and Roth 401(k)
Short and Long-Term Disability Insurance
Life/AD&D Insurance
Commuter Benefits
Student Loan Repayment Program
Educational Assistance & generous paid time off

ATS Keywords

✓ Tailor your resume

Applicant Tracking System Keywords

Tip: use these terms in your resume and cover letter to boost ATS matches.

Hard Skills & Tools

Machine LearningPersonalizationRanking/RetrievalComputational AdvertisingDeep Learning FrameworksData Pipeline ArchitectureFeature Store ManagementA/B Testing FrameworksMetrics DesignModel Serving

Soft Skills

Excellent CommunicationTeam LeadershipStakeholder ManagementMentoring

Certifications

PhD in Computer ScienceMaster's in Related Field