This will be a remote role to start, with plans to transition to hybrid in-office 2x/week located in downtown Toronto.

The Machine Learning team at OpenTable supports a wide range of initiatives targeting diners, restaurants, and internal stakeholders. The team is expanding its role in the restaurant-facing product (OpenTable for Restaurants) to help restaurants optimize their business and delight their guests using ML and AI.

Initiatives include:

• Generative AI for content summarization and question answering.
• Recommendations for changes to floorplans, availability, and marketplace configurations.
• Hospitality improvements via guest insights.
• Demand forecasting.
• Marketing optimization.

As a Senior Machine Learning Engineer you will partner with Machine Learning Scientists and other engineers to train, evaluate, deploy, and monitor models and the features which support them. The primary requirements are a strong engineering background with experience building and maintaining services in production, and a willingness to learn and collaborate. Some knowledge of Machine Learning through work, schooling, or self-learning is expected.

Requirements

• Experience building, testing, deploying, monitoring, and maintaining production systems
• Proficient in Python and at least one strongly typed language
• Demonstrated experience in the principles of ML

Strong Preference

• Machine Learning expertise (especially ranking, recommendations, classification, NLP, LLMs, RL & Optimization)
• Experience developing ETL jobs (especially Spark) or data warehouse infrastructure
• MLOps Experience
• Java proficiency
• Familiarity with A/B Testing best practices
• Track record of project leadership, cross-team collaboration, and coordination with Product Managers and other stakeholders

Bonus

• Pipelines: Spark, Airflow, EMR, Sagemaker, Snowflake, S3, Delta Lake
• ML: PyTorch, XGBoost / CatBoost, Large Language Models
• Deployment: Docker, Kubernetes, Helm, Prometheus, Graphite/Grafana
• Infrastructure: Kafka, ElasticSearch, Postgres, MongoDB, Redis, Qdrant 
• Build: Spring, Maven, Flask, Gunicorn, Poetry, TeamCity

The ML team at OpenTable has two opposing challenges which manifest themselves as opportunities:

OpenTable is the world's leading provider of online restaurant reservations, seating more than 25 million diners per month via online bookings across approximately 60,000 restaurants. It has a massive wealth of diner and restaurant data going back over 20 years.

OpenTable fields a lean team, with just over 1,000 employees globally. The ML team is currently twelve people, but striving to grow.

As a member of the team, you will benefit from these factors because your projects will have sufficient data and usage to be interesting and have a meaningful impact, and you will have the opportunity to work on a variety of interesting projects across the company. However, you will be forced to think critically and ruthlessly prioritize, since the team has finite bandwidth. If these challenges sound interesting, then we look forward to hearing from you!

OpenTable strives to provide a fair, collaborative, and balanced work environment.

Benefits:

• Paid Time Off - 20 days a year
• Birthday/celebration PTO - 1 day
• Annual company weeks off
• Flexible sick time off
• Paid volunteer time
• Parental Leave Benefits
• Dental & Vision Insurance
• Life & Disability Insurance
• Group RRSP and DPSP
• Major Medical Insurance (dependent care options)

There are a variety of factors that go into determining a salary range, including but not limited to external market benchmark data, geographic location, and years of experience sought/required. The range for this Toronto, Canada based role is $150,000-$170,000 CAD.

In addition to a competitive base salary, roles are eligible for additional compensation and benefits including: annual cash bonus, equity grant; health benefits; flexible spending account; retirement benefits; life insurance; paid time off (including PTO, paid sick leave, medical leave, bereavement leave, floating holidays and paid holidays); and parental leave and benefits.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

OpenTable aspires to be a workplace that reflects the diverse communities we serve and a culture that is inclusive and welcoming. Hiring people with different backgrounds, experiences, perspectives, and ideas is critical to innovation and to how we deliver great experiences for our users and our partners. Representation matters.

We ensure that individuals with disabilities are provided reasonable accommodation to participate in the job application or interview process, to perform job responsibilities, and to receive other benefits and privileges of employment. Please contact us to request accommodation.