What's the role?

Etsy is hiring a Senior Software Engineer to join the Perso Engine Foundations squad, a platform team that supports all recommendation systems at Etsy. Our team builds and maintains core infrastructure to serve real-time machine learning recommendations that surface the most relevant and interesting listings to our buyers. We are a cross-functional group of engineers, product managers, and we work closely with Applied Machine Learning (ML) Scientists working on cutting-edge foundational tools and software that accelerate model prototyping, scale up access to data, and create flexible solutions that increase the velocity of our applied scientists. 

Do you find joy in sophisticated architectures that involve distributed systems, machine learning and multiple collaborators? This is a fantastic opportunity for someone interested in building state-of-the-art ML infrastructure to surface hundreds of millions of unique, handmade, vintage listings to 90+ million buyers from 6+ million sellers.

This is a full-time position reporting to the Senior Engineering Manager, ML Systems. In addition to salary, you will also be eligible for an equity package, an annual performance bonus, and our competitive benefits that support you and your family as part of your total rewards package at Etsy.

For this role, we are considering candidates based in the United States. Candidates living within commutable distance of Etsy’s Brooklyn Office Hub or in the San Francisco Bay Area may be the first to be considered. For candidates within commutable distance, Etsy requires in-office attendance once or twice per week depending on your proximity to the office. Etsy offers different work modes to meet the variety of needs and preferences of our team. Learn more details about our work modes and workplace safety policies here.

What does the day-to-day look like?

• Build and maintain foundational ML infrastructure tools for generating personalized recommendations from trained algorithms with point-in-time accuracy

• Create modular components (e.g., filtering, logging, etc.) to add to recommendation pipelines to help support low-latency, high capacity model inferencing

• Engineer pipelines that will enable Applied Scientists to be able to monitor the health of the recommendation systems on any given module

• Work with Applied Scientists to test and enable the latest ML paradigms in information retrieval, e.g., LLMs, uplift modeling, reward learning, and other cutting edge algorithms

• Develop distributed infrastructure with containerized environments and optimized storage layers to support new feature development.

• Build scalable and resilient services and APIs for product teams to interact with feature systems, model training, and new ML features.

• Lead and coordinate cross-team projects across the organization and actively promote best practices and industry standards to maintain the high quality of the product and services.

• Actively work with leadership and product teams on the roadmap and new features.

• Coach and train junior team members.

• Of course, this is just a sample of the kinds of work this role will require! You should assume that your role will encompass other tasks, too, and that your job duties and responsibilities may change from time to time at Etsy's discretion, or otherwise applicable with local law.

Qualities that will help you thrive in this role are:

• You have proven engineering and coding skills, data structure knowledge and ability to write high performance production quality code.

• Background and hands-on experience with Cloud technologies (Google Cloud or AWS).

• You are a strong collaborator and communicator and make the engineers around you grow & learn.

• You have built low-latency high-scale distributed services with technologies such as gRPC, Docker, Kubernetes, Spark, etc.

• You possess fundamental experience with platform engineering and strong troubleshooting skills.

• Prior experience with ML platforms, as well as in caching preferred