The RoleAt the core of Enigma's product is our data, which makes both data science and delivery systems central to what we build.
As a Senior ML Engineer on the Match Team, you will lead efforts that improve the relevance, latency, and scalability of our customer-facing data products. You'll work across the full lifecycle: framing retrieval and ranking problems, developing models and experimentation strategies, evaluating results using real-world signals, and implementing high-throughput search and retrieval systems.
This role is ideal for someone who is excited by both hard ranking/search problems and the systems challenges of turning those solutions into low-latency, production-grade retrieval systems.
What You'll Do- Develop innovative solutions to complex problems in information retrieval, ranking, semantic search, query understanding, and recommendation systems
- Build and optimize low-latency, high-throughput search APIs, indexing pipelines, and retrieval systems using Python, Typesense, and AWS
- Evaluate and evolve our search technology stack, driving technical design decisions across indexing strategies, retrieval architecture, and system performance tradeoffs
- Lead end-to-end work from research design through experimentation, productionization, and customer-facing delivery
- Design evaluation frameworks for measuring relevance, precision/recall, ranking quality, and user engagement signals
- Improve query understanding via techniques like embedding models, vector search, hybrid retrieval, and query rewriting
- Detect and investigate anomalies in search performance, ranking behavior, and data freshness, tracing issues to root cause
- Partner closely with Product, Engineering, and client stakeholders to improve search experience and discoverability
- Mentor teammates and help raise the bar for experimentation rigor, system design, and operational excellence
What Makes This Role Exciting?- Impact: At Enigma, data science and machine learning aren't just used to make product decisions; they are the product. Your work will directly shape how customers find, explore, and trust our data.
- Technical Challenge: This role spans some of the hardest challenges in search relevance, large-scale retrieval systems, ranking models, APIs, and distributed systems. If you like a technical challenge, this role is for you.
- Ownership: You'll have meaningful autonomy to shape both research direction and the production systems that power it, including having a strong voice in our tooling and vendor ecosystem.
- Customer Proximity: Your work will directly influence how sophisticated customers integrate Enigma data into critical workflows and decision-making systems.
Our Ideal Candidate- Brings 5+ years of experience across machine learning, software engineering, data science, or data-intensive product systems
- Has strong programming proficiency in Python and experience operating within cloud environments (AWS preferred)
- Demonstrated applied, production-level expertise in two or more of the following technical domains: information retrieval, ranking systems, NLP/embedding models, or distributed systems.
- Has experience designing, fine-tuning, and operating high-scale backend systems, APIs, or data delivery platforms
- Brings strong judgment in ambiguous environments where relevance signals and ground truth are noisy or implicit
- Effectively communicates technical concepts and tradeoffs to technical and non-technical audiences
- Thrives in highly collaborative environments with strong ownership and fast iteration cycles
- Has an advanced degree in a quantitative discipline or equivalent deep industry experience
Bonus Points If You- Have deep experience with our core stack (Typesense, Python, AWS) or similar retrieval infrastructure (Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, FAISS)
- Have built customer-facing search or recommendation systems or APIs
- Have worked on query understanding, embeddings, LLM-powered retrieval, or hybrid search systems
- Have mentored senior engineers or data scientists and raised the technical bar across disciplines
Salary Range: $160,000-$210,000
A note on salary ranges: we pride ourselves on paying competitively for our size and industry. Salary is one piece of a total Enigma compensation package that includes additional benefits and opportunities. All of our compensation packages include equity because we believe 100% of Enigma employees should have the option to purchase ownership in the company and benefit from the value we're creating together.
