Staff+ Forward Deployed Research Engineer – Ranking

Staff+ Forward Deployed Research Engineer — Search & Recommendations ABOUT US Sequen provides an integrated platform that pairs cutting-edge frontier ranking models with the infrastructure to run them in production at enterprise scale. The world's largest retailers, marketplaces, and travel platforms use Sequen to rank, recommend, and personalize, with an autonomous research engine that compounds model performance into revenue and margin lift measured in hundreds of millions of dollars per customer. We are a small, highly technical, early-stage team focused on turning recent advances in AI into production-grade systems that operate under unforgiving real-world constraints. The problems we work on are deeply open-ended, where minor optimizations in algorithmic multi-stage retrieval and model routing translate directly into millions of dollars in client revenue. ABOUT THE ROLE We’re looking for a Staff+ Forward Deployed Research Engineer with deep expertise in search and recommendation modeling to help us design, develop, and scale innovative ranking, embedding, and retrieval systems that power our personalized discovery platform. In this role, you’ll have the unique opportunity to work at the intersection of cutting-edge AI research and production-grade software systems. You will work directly within our customers' digital environments—helping them translate user behavior data into direct revenue and conversion lift. This is an ideal role for someone eager to take end-to-end ownership of highly complex ML lifecycles and operate within an agile, elite startup environment. KEY RESPONSIBILITIES Deploy production models: Work directly within customer environments to design, build, and deploy production ranking and recommendation models that directly optimize for business conversion, engagement, and lifetime value. Deliver technical artifacts: Engineer end-to-end ranking pipelines, embedding generation schemas, nearest-neighbor retrieval systems, and low-latency model serving infrastructure. Provide white-glove partnership: Deliver high-touch deployment support inside large consumer enterprise environments, ensuring seamless integration with existing data ecosystems and business logic. Architect data pipelines: Design and maintain production-grade, highly optimized data pipelines to process massive datasets, ensuring models are continuously fed with fresh, reliable training and inference features. Codify repeatable patterns: Identify and modularize repeatable deployment patterns across various industry verticals, contributing key insights back to Sequen's core product and engineering teams. Own production lifecycles: Manage the entire ML lifecycle end-to-end, including model monitoring, A/B testing frameworks, performance regression detection, and continuous retraining strategies. Drive research frontiers: Maintain deep, active expertise in the latest developments in deep learning, including multi-stage retrieval, learning-to-rank, and large-scale personalization techniques. Uncover organic expansion: Build strong relationships with client engineering teams and proactively identify new opportunities to deploy ranking solutions that unlock additional customer value. Champion Sequen's mission: Act as a technical representative of Sequen AI's vision to shape end-user behavior for the world's largest consumer platforms. ABOUT YOU Proven track record: Bring 7+ years of experience as an ML Engineer, Applied Scientist, or Forward Deployed Engineer with a heavy focus on deep learning for search, recommendation, or retrieval systems. Model building mastery: Possess deep proficiency in PyTorch, deep learning theory, and machine learning algorithms (specifically multi-stage scoring and embedding models). Data pipeline proficiency: Demonstrate hands-on experience designing and optimizing large-scale, distributed data pipelines using Spark, Airflow, and dbt across GCP and AWS environments. Cloud & infra maturity: Operate comfortably with Kubernetes, Airflow, Terraform, and cloud platforms like AWS and GCP to manage scalable model deployment and experimentation environments. Analytical problem solver: Excel at tackling open-ended, highly complex systems challenges that require first-principles thinking. Extreme ownership mindset: Take absolute accountability for driving customer outcomes from early prototyping and training to live production inference. Strong Candidates May Also Bring Domain-specific vertical exposure: Experience deploying high-throughput personalization systems directly within retail, travel, or media/entertainment verticals. Alternative commercial models: Familiarity with modern pricing systems, such as usage-based, value-based, or lift-share models. Applied research footprint: A history of peer-reviewed publications (e.g., KDD, CIKM, RecSys) or registered patents in search, matching, or personalization. Hybrid pipeline exposure: Experience supporting developer-focused, product-led narratives alongside enterprise-scale sales cycles. WHAT WE VALUE Rigorous systems & scientific thinking: You balance algorithmic complexity with microsecond runtime latency constraints. You choose the right mathematical model for the client's current data maturity, prioritizing real-world conversion metrics over theoretical vanity scores. Uncompromising ownership: You treat production stability and client performance as a personal reflection of code quality, taking pride in driving use cases end-to-end from feature engineering to live inference scoring. Pragmatic speed: You possess the startup velocity to design, deploy, and validate robust revenue-generating prototypes quickly without accumulating debilitating technical debt. Strategic relationship building: You can speak fluently with both deep research scientists and cross-functional enterprise executives, proactively identifying new technical opportunities to unlock additional client value throughout the lifecycle of an engagement. WHAT WE OFFER High-impact influence: A highly visible, staff-level role directly shaping the core deployment topology of a category-defining AI company. Pioneering systems: The unique opportunity to build and scale category-defining, low-latency ML platforms backed by proven, highly quantified customer revenue results. Top-tier reward: Highly competitive base salary ranging from $300,000 to $350,000 USD , plus meaningful early-employee equity, performance bonuses, and comprehensive premium health benefits. Complete flexibility: Unlimited paid time off, flexible hybrid/remote configurations, and a highly collaborative, world-class engineering culture.