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About the Role

The Data Science team is seeking a Staff Machine Learning Scientist to lead and advance the development of personalization products, including recommender systems for websites, email programs, and online marketing. This role will own personalization and recommender system work end-to-end, from model development to deployment to output monitoring, in close partnership with business stakeholders, platform engineers, and the rest of the personalization group. We are investing in expanding our portfolio of business-critical personalization products and further improving our existing models.

Responsibilities

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.
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

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.
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.
Be cutting edge. Use the latest AI tools to develop well-designed and robust software.

Skills

Expert-level Python
Deep proficiency with modern ML frameworks (PyTorch or TensorFlow)
Recommendation-specific tooling (e.g., NVTabular, Merlin, Triton)
Strong experience with cloud-based ML infrastructure (AWS, Kubernetes, Databricks)
Containerization (Docker)
Model serving at low latency
Advanced SQL skills
Experience architecting large-scale data pipelines and feature stores
Experience building and scaling real-time recommendation services handling millions of requests.
Expertise in A/B testing methodology, causal inference, or experimentation platforms.
Familiarity with LLM-based approaches to recommendation and content understanding.
Experience with MLOps practices: model monitoring, feature stores, CI/CD for ML, and automated retraining pipelines.
Prior experience technically leading a team of ML practitioners and setting standards adopted by others.
Experience with Claude Code or agentic workflows is a plus.

Work Type

Full-time

Experience Level

Staff
Senior
Mid-level

Education Level

PhD
Master's

Salary/Compensations

$210,000 - $250,000

Benefits

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
Annual profit award or bonus

About the Company

Penguin Random House is the leading adult and children's publishing house in North America, the United Kingdom and many other regions around the world.
In publishing the best books in every genre and subject for all ages, we are committed to quality, excellence in execution, and innovation throughout the entire publishing process: editorial, design, marketing, publicity, sales, production, and distribution.
Our vibrant and diverse international community of nearly 300 publishing brands and imprints include Ballantine Bantam Dell, Berkley, Clarkson Potter, Crown, DK, Doubleday, Dutton, Grosset & Dunlap, Little Golden Books, Knopf, Modern Library, Pantheon, Penguin Books, Penguin Press, Penguin Random House Audio, Penguin Young Readers, Portfolio, Puffin, Putnam, Random House, Random House Children's Books, Riverhead, Ten Speed Press, Viking, and Vintage, among others.
More information can be found at http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/.

Equal Opportunity

Penguin Random House values the array of talents and perspectives that a diverse workforce brings. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, national origin, religion, age, color, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, or protected veteran status.
All your information will be kept confidential according to EEO guidelines.