Machine Learning Engineer

The Company:

Outschool’s mission is to inspire kids to love learning. In our fast-changing world, the traditional educational system struggles to meet the diverse and evolving needs of young learners. Outschool reimagines this system, offering flexible and engaging learning experiences as a supplement and alternative to traditional education. By connecting learners with a global community of teachers and peers through our online platform, we make learning personal, dynamic, and deeply human.

We've made significant strides since launching our marketplace of live online classes in 2017. Finding initial success with secular homeschoolers, we then expanded to enrichment learning to meet the needs of a wider audience, growing our business 16x since 2019. Post-pandemic, we have evolved our platform to power academic learning, incorporated AI, and have begun to grow our international community. We're proud to have served over 1M passionate learners with more than $100M in annual bookings.   Driving disruptive, positive change in education is rewarding and hard. Outschool team members are encouraged to challenge themselves, take risks, and grow in their careers. We look for talented people whose sense of urgency, innate curiosity, and determination to drive impact will help Outschool achieve outsized results in pursuit of our mission. We invite you to be part of an ambitious team dedicated to ensuring every learner can navigate the future with curiosity, resilience, and a love of learning.

About the Role: 

You would be joining Outschool’s Marketplace team which focuses on helping parents discover great classes for their learners. You’d be responsible for designing & implementing improvements to our search & recommendation algorithms, thinking through the whole process from idea through data transformation, training, evaluation, and validation on production traffic.

We are an effective team of engineers distributed across the US with a mix of ML and full-stack product engineering skills. Our philosophy is to start small and then intentionally iterate to test our assumptions with data and learn quickly. We're iteratively building up a complex product for a highly engaged audience, getting a lot done by staying focused on the work that matters.

Our ML stack is primarily Python and SQL, producing models that plug into our product built with TypeScript, React, GraphQL/Apollo, Node, and OpenSearch.

This role requires working in our San Francisco office (SoMa) 1 day a week.

Core Responsibilities: 

• Design and build machine learning systems that improve search relevance, ranking, and recommendations
• Develop, train, evaluate, and deploy models in production using Python
• Partner closely with Engineering, Product, Data Science, and Design to translate user needs into ML solutions
• Iterate on models using real-world data, experimentation, and user feedback
• Improve ML infrastructure, training pipelines, and evaluation frameworks
• Contribute to end-to-end product development, including shipping features and monitoring performance in production
• Participate in day-to-day team activities, including sprint planning, daily standups, retros, deploying features in production and on-call rotations

Desired Skills and Responsibilities:

• 2+ years of experience in Machine Learning, Software Engineering, or Data Science
• Strong foundation in Python
• Comfort working with data using SQL and large-scale datasets
• Ability to reason about tradeoffs, experiment, and iterate quickly
• Strong collaboration skills and comfort working cross-functionally
• Hands-on experience with AI software development tooling
• Proficiency in crafting, testing, and refining prompts to guide generative AI models

Other Considerations:

• Experience in startup or high-growth environments
• Experience with search, ranking, or recommendation systems
• Experience working with Opensearch, TypeScript, SageMaker, Redshift, Postgres, and DBT are a plus

Compensation:

Outschool recruits across the US and Canada, and sets employee salaries to reflect local compensation and cost of living. This role is available in the following US Pay Zones:

US Tiers

US Tier 1: San Francisco Bay Area and New York City

US Tier 2: All California excluding San Francisco Bay Area, Seattle Metro, Boston Metro, Chicago Metro, Denver Metro, Austin Metro, Portland Metro

US Tier 3: All other cities and states

US Pay Zones

US Tier 1: $135,000-$150,000

US Tier 2: $115,000-$127,500

US Tier 3: $101,000-112,500

We use Covey as part