Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Ads - Quora (Remote)

[Quora is a privately held, "remote-first" company https://www.quora.com/q/quora/Remote-First-at-Quora. This position can be performed remotely from multiple countries around the world. Please visit careers.quora.com/eligible-countries http://careers.quora.com/eligible-countries for details regarding employment eligibility by country.] ABOUT QUORA: Quora’s mission is to grow the world's collective intelligence. To do so, we have two platforms: - Quora http://quora.com: a global knowledge sharing platform with over 300M monthly unique visitors, bringing people together to share insights on various topics and providing a unique platform to learn and connect with others. - Poe https://poe.com/: a platform providing millions of global users with one place to chat, explore and build with a wide variety of AI language models (bots), including GPT-5.4, Claude-Opus-4.6, Gemini-3.1-Pro, Nano-Banana-Pro, Veo-3.1, and more. As AI capabilities rapidly advance, Poe provides a single platform to instantly integrate and utilize these new models. Behind these products are passionate, collaborative, and high-performing global teams. We have a culture rooted in transparency, idea-sharing, and experimentation that allows us to celebrate success and grow together through meaningful work. Join us on this journey to create a positive impact and make a significant change in the world. This role will be working on our Quora product. ABOUT THE TEAM AND ROLE: Our Monetization team works on challenging problems every day. Our Machine Learning Engineers are tasked with optimizing the advertising product at Quora. The team covers the entire Machine Learning Ads lifecycle from end-to-end, including ads targeting, ranking and auction dynamics, and quality measurement. Engrained in our culture is the desire to constantly learn and improve, and our engineers are encouraged to think big and experiment with new ideas. Using continuous deployment, we quickly see our changes in the product and make fast iterations. Our engineers focus on creating polished products and writing high-quality code by designing APIs and abstractions that are extensible and maintainable. As a remote-first company, our engineers have a high degree of flexibility and autonomy. Everyone on the engineering team has a huge impact on our product, revenue and company. Since we first launched our advertising platform, we've grown to support thousands of advertisers who are reaching over 300 million+ monthly unique visitors on Quora. Our journey is just beginning as we continue to build new products from the ground up and tackle exciting challenges at scale. Today, we're working on a broad range of areas to grow our ads product to drive more value to our users and advertisers. As a member of the Ads Machine Learning team, you will have a chance to work with a diverse and talented global team of engineers and collaborate closely with cross-functional partners to help advertisers reach their performance goals through next-generation targeting and bidding products and to build a stronger connection between Quora users and its business products. RESPONSIBILITIES: - Improve our existing machine learning systems using your core coding skills and ML knowledge - Take end to end ownership of machine learning systems - from data pipelines, feature engineering, candidate extraction, model training, as well as integration into our production systems - Apply state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms at scale and serving for next-generation targeting and bidding products that directly impact the company’s top line metrics - Collaborate with ML platform and product engineers to build scalable and efficient machine learning systems in the production environment - Work with product and business teams on new innovative features for ad targeting and bidding to optimize advertisement performance - Identify new opportunities to apply machine learning to different parts of the Ads product to drive value for our users and advertisers MINIMUM REQUIREMENTS: - Availability for meetings and impromptu communication during Quora's “coordination hours https://quora.com/coordination_hours" (Mon-Fri: 9am-3pm Pacific Time) - 5+ years of professional software development experience in machine learning - Previous experience working in Adtech, developing ad targeting/retrieval/recommender systems - Previous experience building large scale ranking/recommendation systems - Good understanding of mathematical foundations of machine learning algorithms - Highly proficient coding ability writing Python - BS, MS or PhD in Computer Science, Engineering or a related technical field PREFERRED REQUIREMENTS: - Experience with leading large-scale multi-engineer projects - Experience in productized reinforcement learning - Experience working with CTR, CVR, auto-bidding and auction systems - Effective communicator with strong leadership skills - Passion for Quor