
Staff Engineer – Applied ML, Search & Recommendations
Parspec
full-time
Posted on:
Location Type: Hybrid
Location: San Mateo • California • United States
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Salary
💰 $220,000 - $280,000 per year
Job Level
About the role
- Own the architecture for our hybrid search engine, blending keyword-based retrieval with dense vector embeddings to improve precision and recall.
- Design and scale personalization algorithms that suggest products based on project specs, historical data, and cross-catalog compatibility.
- Lead the fine-tuning of open-source and proprietary LLMs/encoders for specialized construction domain tasks, including NER and relationship extraction from complex documents.
- Architect and optimize our vector database strategy for high-concurrency retrieval and low-latency ranking.
- Work closely with product managers, UX designers, and business leadership to integrate AI components into fully functional systems.
- Participate in the complete product lifecycle from concept design to development, testing, and deployment.
- Build products that handle large data volumes efficiently while remaining highly scalable for new clients.
- Design end-to-end data and ML pipelines for seamless production integration and monitoring.
- Work with the leadership team on research efforts to explore cutting-edge technologies.
- Uphold a culture of excellence by maintaining high standards in code quality, innovation, and rigorous experimentation.
Requirements
- Bachelor’s or Master’s degree (PhD preferred) in Science or Engineering with strong programming and analytical skills.
- Deep conceptual understanding and hands-on experience in Search, Ranking, Recommendation systems, or NLP/Document Extraction.
- Expertise in Python (NumPy, scikit-learn, pandas) and training deep learning models using PyTorch or TensorFlow.
- Ability to drive high standards for clean, efficient, and bug-free code.
- Deep experience with Learning to Rank (LTR), BM25, and hybrid retrieval strategies.
- Hands-on experience with Vector Databases (Pinecone, Qdrant, Milvus) and optimizing embedding spaces for domain-specific retrieval.
- Expertise in fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) and Bi-Encoders/Cross-Encoders for specialized semantic search.
- Experience building evaluation frameworks for search (nDCG, MRR) and managing the lifecycle of embedding deployments.
- Hands-on experience with agentic frameworks (e.g., LangGraph, AutoGen, or CrewAI) for building complex, multi-step reasoning chains.
- A track record of publications in top-tier conferences (e.g., NeurIPS, SIGIR, KDD, ACL) or significant contributions to open-source ML projects.
Benefits
- Competitive salary and discretionary bonus, plus equity options.
- Unlimited PTO policy
- Medical, dental, and vision coverage
- Flexible hybrid work environment
- Regular team offsites and a budget for professional development
Applicant Tracking System Keywords
Tip: use these terms in your resume and cover letter to boost ATS matches.
Hard Skills & Tools
PythonNumPyscikit-learnpandasPyTorchTensorFlowLearning to RankBM25NLPDocument Extraction
Soft Skills
analytical skillsleadershipcommunicationcollaborationinnovationcode qualityproblem-solvingresearchhigh standardsrigorous experimentation