Principal Machine Learning Engineer

About the Role

We are looking for a Principal Machine Learning Engineer to set the technical direction for personalization and discovery across our global streaming platforms. Your mission is to define the long-term architecture and modeling strategy that helps millions of viewers find films, series, live sports, and news on Paramount+, Pluto TV, and future streaming products. You will focus on recommendations, ranking, retrieval, and real-time user awareness in a GCP-based environment using TensorFlow and PyTorch, with an emphasis on modern personalization techniques such as representation learning, multi-modal embeddings, contextual bandits, and session modeling.

This is a Principal role, meaning you are the senior-most technical authority in the organization. You set multi-quarter technical strategy, drive cross-team alignment, and are accountable for the scientific rigor of how we model long-term user satisfaction.

Why This Role Matters

• Setting the Architecture: You define the multi-stage personalization architecture—retrieval, ranking, re-ranking, and exploration—that determines what content each user sees, shaping how they interact, discover, and stay engaged over time.
• Beyond the Click: You establish how we frame and optimize reward signals, ensuring personalization drives durable retention rather than short-term interaction traps.
• Org-Level Quality Bar: You raise the technical bar across the Applied ML organization, anticipate systemic risks (data, modeling, feedback loops), and influence the broader personalization roadmap.

Responsibilities

• Set Technical Strategy: Own the multi-quarter technical roadmap for personalization, covering candidate generation, ranking, and exploration.
• Architect End-to-End Systems: Design multi-stage personalization systems—retrieval, deep ranking, contextual embeddings, and bandit-based exploration—from feature engineering to training, serving, and monitoring.
• Advance Modeling in Production: Drive advanced techniques like representation learning, multi-task learning, multi-modal embeddings, and session modeling to improve user satisfaction.
• Cross-Pod Influence: Partner with Core Science, Content Understanding, ML Platform, and Product teams to align personalization with broader strategy.
• Operate at Scale: Ensure personalization pipelines are high-throughput, reliable, and observable in GCP using TensorFlow/PyTorch and big-data tooling (Beam, BigQuery).
• Raise Experimentation Quality: Establish practices for high-integrity experiments, improve offline/online metric correlation, and guide feature rollouts with rigorous scientific methods.
• Mentorship & Talent: Mentor engineers, set technical standards across the org, and grow the next generation of senior ML talent.
• Mitigate Systemic Risk: Identify and address feedback loops, exposure biases, and filter-bubble dynamics in content surfacing.

Requirements

• 8+ years of experience in MLE, applied science, or large-scale recommender/ranking systems, with a track record of setting technical direction.
• Proficient in representation learning, multi-modal embeddings, contextual bandits, and session modeling.
• Robust fluency in experimentation methodology, A/B testing, causal reasoning, and metric design.
• Proficiency in GCP, TensorFlow, and PyTorch.
• Demonstrated ability to influence technical strategy across multiple teams.

Bonus Skills

• Experience in high-traffic, real-time streaming or consumer apps.
• Published work or recognized contributions in ranking, recommender systems, or applied ML.

About Paramount Streaming

Paramount Streaming, a division of Paramount Global, is home to the company’s direct-to-consumer services, including Pluto TV (the global leader in free ad-supported TV with over 1,400 global channels and an extensive content library) and Paramount+ (a digital subscription video-on-demand and live streaming service featuring live sports, breaking news, and a vast library of original series, hit shows, and movies).

Pay

Hiring salary range: $233,600.00 – $350,400.00. This range applies to New York, California, Colorado, Washington state, and most other geographies. Starting pay depends on job-related factors, including geographic location, market demands, experience, training, and education.

Benefits

• Medical, dental, and vision coverage.
• 401(k) plan with company matching.
• Life insurance and disability benefits.
• Tuition assistance program.
• Paid time off (PTO) or, if applicable, benefits as dictated by the appropriate Collective Bargaining Agreement.
• Bonus eligibility.
• Generous paid time off.
• Opportunities for on-site and virtual engagement events.
• Unique opportunities to build community and connections within Paramount.

For a full list of benefits, visit Paramount Benefits.