Machine Learning Engineer - Search

Every day, millions of people search for products across Shopify's ecosystem. That's not just queries—that's dreams, businesses, and livelihoods riding on whether someone finds the perfect vintage jacket or the exact drill bit they need. As a Machine Learning Engineer specializing in Search Recommendations, you'll be the one making that magic happen. With a search index unifying over a billion products, you're tackling one of the hardest search problems at unprecedented scale. We're building cutting-edge product search from the ground up using the latest LLM advances and vector matching technologies to create search experiences that truly understand what people are looking for. Key Responsibilities: Design and implement AI-powered features to enhance search recommendations and personalization Collaborate with data scientists and engineers to productionize data products through rigorous experimentation and metrics analysis Build and maintain robust, scalable data pipelines for search and recommendation systems Develop comprehensive tools for evaluation and relevance engineering, following high-quality software engineering practices Mentor engineers and data scientists while fostering a culture of innovation and technical excellence Qualifications: Expertise in relevance engineering and recommendation systems, with hands-on experience in Elasticsearch, Solr, or vector databases Strong proficiency in Python with solid object-oriented programming skills Proven ability to write optimized, low-latency code for high-performance systems Experience deploying machine learning, NLP, or generative AI products at scale (strong plus) Familiarity with statistical methods and exposure to Ruby, Rails, or Rust (advantageous) Track record of shipping ML solutions that real users depend on Ready to make search more magical? Join the team that's making commerce better for everyone. At Shopify, we pride ourselves on moving quickly—not just in shipping, but in our hiring process as well. If you're ready to apply, please be prepared to interview with us within the week. Our goal is to complete the entire interview loop within 30 days. You will be expected to complete a live pair programming session, come prepared with your own IDE. This role may require on-call work