Senior Machine Learning Engineer
TaboolaSr Machine Learning Engineer
Location: Downtown Los Angeles Employment type: Hybrid
About Taboola
Taboola empowers businesses to grow through performance advertising technology that goes beyond search and social and delivers measurable outcomes at scale. Taboola works with thousands of businesses who advertise directly on Realize, Taboola's powerful ad platform, reaching approximately 600M daily active users across some of the best publishers in the world. Publishers like NBC News, Yahoo, and OEMs such as Samsung, Xiaomi and others use Taboola's technology to grow audience and revenue, enabling Realize to offer unique data, specialized algorithms, and unmatched scale.
Taboola is a proud Great Place to Work® Certified employer in the US.
About the Role
As a Sr Machine Learning Engineer on Taboola's R&D Team, you will work on the recommendation and ranking algorithms that drive Realize — Taboola's performance advertising platform serving 600M+ daily active users. The models you build directly influence campaign performance and revenue outcomes for advertisers worldwide.
Responsibilities
- Design and build predictive customer behavior models for targeting and personalization
- Implement applicable Machine Learning or statistics based algorithms for prediction and optimization and deliver the trained model to production
- Take end-to-end ownership: design, build, ship, measure, and maintain models and the services around them—rapidly prototyping and delivering complete projects/products using AI-assisted "vibe coding" workflows
- Act as a Harness Engineer: build the evaluation harnesses, automated testing frameworks, benchmarks, and guardrails that let the team experiment, measure model quality, and ship AI/ML systems safely and repeatedly, following a TDD process
- Present findings to the product team and technical team leads in a clear and actionable way
- Build and maintain code to populate HDFS, Hadoop with log from Kafka or data loaded from SQL production systems
- Design, build and support algorithms of data transformation, conversion, computation on Hadoop, Spark and other distributed Big Data Systems
Requirements
- Bachelor or advanced degree in a relevant field, ideally Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or Computational Economics
- 5+ years of hands-on experience in Python and Java
- Proficiency with ML frameworks (e.g., PyTorch, Tensorflow)
- Experience with recommendation systems, ranking algorithms, or personalization at scale
- Experience taking end-to-end ownership of ML systems: design, build, ship, measure, and maintain — using AI-assisted "vibe coding" tools (e.g., Cursor, Claude, GitHub Copilot)
- Experience building automated evaluation harnesses and test frameworks for ML systems — defining benchmarks, baselines, and guardrails that let a team ship confidently and repeatedly
- Ability to communicate technical findings clearly, and to collaborate effectively across teams (including early morning or evening syncs with our Tel Aviv team)
Bonus Qualifications
- Experience with Karpathy's autoresearch (MIT), AutoML or any other agentic tools for ML experiments
Why Taboola?
- Well-being: Comprehensive benefits (health, dental, vision, 401k matching), a fully stocked kitchen and parking
- Flexibility: Hybrid work schedule with 3 days in-office with an option to come in more often if desired
- Scale: Work with some of the biggest names — publisher partners include Yahoo, Conde Nast, Fox Sports, NBCU, ESPN, CBS, and E! Online; advertiser clients include Wells Fargo, Honda, Pinterest, and Expedia
- Culture: Empowered to realize your full potential while growing and learning from and with smart and talented people
Compensation
Base Salary Pay Range: $138,500—$195,000 USD
The pay offered may vary depending on several factors such as location, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. We may offer several perks as part of the compensation package that include a discretionary bonus, equity, flexible PTO, medical/dental/vision insurance, a competitive 401(k) match, paid parental leave, and more.
Equal Opportunity
Taboola is an equal opportunity employer and we value diversity in all forms. We are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees and believe such an environment is critical for success. Employment is decided on the basis of qualifications, merit, and business need.
About Taboola
<cite index="1-2">Taboola operates a digital advertising platform that connects advertisers with audiences across a network of publisher websites and digital properties.</cite> <cite index="10-1">The company empowers businesses to grow through performance advertising technology that goes beyond search and social and delivers measurable outcomes at scale.</cite> <cite index="11-4,11-5">Realize, its performance platform, is the only independent performance platform that goes beyond search and social media and delivers outcomes at scale for advertisers, leveraging Taboola's unique supply, first party data and AI technology, delivering simplicity and efficiency for advertisers to run performance-based campaigns on many of the world's largest and most trusted publishers across all ad inventory, OEMs and apps.</cite>
Interested in this role?
Apply now to join Taboola.