Machine Learning Engineer, Marketplace

Mercor Alabaster

$130K — $180K *
Enterprise Technology
Less than 5 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 5+ years of experience in machine learning or distributed systems engineering.
  • Proven track record of ownership in large-scale search or recommender systems.
  • Strong understanding of low-latency and high-throughput architecture.
  • Experience with real-time data processing and event pipelines.
  • Familiarity with cloud infrastructure and container orchestration tools.

Responsibilities

  • Build low-latency ranking and matching pipelines for processing signals.
  • Develop off-platform people search and job-distribution systems.
  • Create production ML infrastructure for personalization and model incentives.
  • Design real-time event and data pipelines with high-throughput APIs.
  • Implement observability for mission-critical services.

Benefits

  • Generous equity grant vested over 4 years.
  • $20K relocation bonus if moving to the Bay Area.
  • $10K housing bonus for living within 0.5 miles of the office.
  • $1.5K monthly stipend for meals.
  • Free Equinox membership.
  • Health insurance.
Full Job Description
About the Role
As a Machine Learning Engineer on the Marketplace team, you will build the models and decision systems that power Mercor's hiring engine. This includes search and ranking, candidate-job matching, marketplace recommendations, personalization, and allocation decisions across a rapidly growing talent network.

This is an applied ML role with direct product and revenue impact. You will work on problems shaped by real marketplace constraints: sparse and delayed labels, cold start, noisy feedback, heterogeneous supply and demand, and the need to optimize across speed, quality, and conversion simultaneously.

What You'll Build
• Ranking and matching systems that determine which candidates and opportunities are surfaced
• Models for recommendation, personalization, and marketplace optimization
• Retrieval, scoring, and decision pipelines operating at global scale
• Feedback loops that learn from downstream hiring outcomes, not just top-of-funnel engagement
• Real-time and batch inference systems embedded in product-critical workflows

Example Problems
• Improve candidate-job matching using embeddings, structured attributes, and behavioral signals
• Optimize ranking toward long-term hiring outcomes under delayed and incomplete labels
• Design models that balance marketplace objectives such as fill rate, quality, speed, and conversion
• Build systems for candidate allocation, opportunity routing, and liquidity optimization
• Develop evaluation and experimentation frameworks that connect model performance to business results

What We're Looking For
• Strong track record of shipping ML systems into production
• Experience with ranking, recommendation, search, matching, or marketplace problems
• Good judgment on model design, objective functions, evaluation, and tradeoffs
• Comfort working across the full applied ML stack: data, features, training, inference, and iteration
• Strong engineering fundamentals and a bias toward simple, robust systems

Why This Role

This role sits on a core decision layer of the product. Your work will directly shape how talent is discovered, matched, and hired, and will influence fundamental marketplace outcomes across quality, speed, and revenue.

Tech Stack
Python, Go, embeddings, fine-tuning, RAG, Kafka, Postgres, Redis, Elasticsearch, Kubernetes, Terraform

Benefits
  • Bi-annual performance bonus structure
  • Generous equity grant vested over 4 years
  • Up to $15k Relocation bonus
  • $10K housing bonus (if you live within 0.5 miles of our office)
  • $1.5K monthly stipend for meals
  • Free Equinox membership
  • $200 monthly laundry reimbursement
  • $200 monthly personal wellness reimbursement
  • Health, Dental, Vision insurance

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