Machine Learning Engineer

The Company: Outschool’s mission is to inspire kids to love learning. In our fast-changing world, the traditional educational system struggles to meet the diverse and evolving needs of young learners. Outschool reimagines this system, offering flexible and engaging learning experiences as a supplement and alternative to traditional education. By connecting learners with a global community of teachers and peers through our online platform, we make learning personal, dynamic, and deeply human. We've made significant strides since launching our marketplace of live online classes in 2017. Finding initial success with secular homeschoolers, we then expanded to enrichment learning to meet the needs of a wider audience, growing our business 16x since 2019. Post-pandemic, we have evolved our platform to power academic learning, incorporated AI, and have begun to grow our international community. We're proud to have served over 1M passionate learners with more than $100M in annual bookings. Driving disruptive, positive change in education is rewarding and hard. Outschool team members are encouraged to challenge themselves, take risks, and grow in their careers. We look for talented people whose sense of urgency, innate curiosity, and determination to drive impact will help Outschool achieve outsized results in pursuit of our mission. We invite you to be part of an ambitious team dedicated to ensuring every learner can navigate the future with curiosity, resilience, and a love of learning. About the Role: You would be joining Outschool’s Marketplace team which focuses on helping parents discover great classes for their learners. You’d be responsible for designing implementing improvements to our search recommendation algorithms, thinking through the whole process from idea through data transformation, training, evaluation, and validation on production traffic. We are an effective team of engineers distributed across the US with a mix of ML and full-stack product engineering skills. Our philosophy is to start small and then intentionally iterate to test our assumptions with data and learn quickly. We're iteratively building up a complex product for a highly engaged audience, getting a lot done by staying focused on the work that matters. Our ML stack is primarily Python and SQL, producing models that plug into our product built with TypeScript, React, GraphQL/Apollo, Node, and OpenSearch. We prioritize candidates based in the San Francisco Bay Area, with the expectation of working out of our SoMa office one day per week. That said, we are open to candidates outside the Bay Area based on experience and fit. Core Responsibilities: Collaborate with a team of Engineers, Product Managers, Data Scientists, and Designers to improve class search and recommendations for parents, learners, and educators Develop, train, evaluate, and maintain machine learning models in Python Identify opportunities for improving ML modeling, training and evaluation techniques Work with the team to gather requirements, day-to-day activities such as daily standups, sprint planning, retros, deploying features in production and on-call Desired Skills and Responsibilities: 2+ years of experience working in software engineering or data science Experience with Python and SQL databases Hands-on experience with AI software development tooling Proficiency in crafting, testing, and refining prompts to guide generative AI models Other Considerations: Previous experience in startups Previous EdTech or search engineering experience Experience working with Opensearch, TypeScript, SageMaker, Redshift, Postgres, and DBT are a plus Compensation: Outschool recruits across the US and Canada, and sets employee salaries to reflect local compensation and cost of living. This role is available in the following US Pay Zones: US Tiers US Tier 1: San Francisco Bay Area and New York City US Tier 2: All California excluding San Francisco Bay Area, Seattle Metro, Bost ... (truncated, view full listing at source)