Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Discovery Recommendations

What We Do

Our Data & Analytics teams build powerful stories and visuals that inform the games we make, the technology we develop, and business decisions that drive Epic. You will design, build, and optimize the recommendation systems that power Fortnite's Discover experience, serving personalized recommendations to one of the largest player bases in gaming across a massive catalog of creator-built experiences.

What You'll Do

• Design and implement retrieval, ranking, and reranking models for creator content using deep learning approaches (two-tower architectures, transformer-based sequence models, embedding-based retrieval)
• Build and optimize multi-stage candidate generation and impression allocation pipelines that balance relevance, diversity, and fair content exposure across a large and rapidly evolving catalog
• Design and run A/B experiments to validate model improvements, own evaluation frameworks that capture recommendation quality holistically, and drive the path from experiment to production deployment
• Collaborate with analytics and content quality teams on ranking signals including genre classification, creator credibility, and content quality metrics
• Own ML infrastructure decisions: choosing the right tradeoffs between batch, near-real-time, and streaming serving architectures

What We're Looking For

• 5+ years of experience building production recommendation or ranking systems, ideally in a UGC, marketplace, or content discovery context
• Experience with deep learning for information retrieval and multi-stage recommendation pipelines (candidate generation, scoring, reranking)
• Demonstrated ability to design and analyze A/B experiments, with awareness of biases inherent to recommendation systems
• Strong Python engineering skills with experience in PyTorch and large-scale data processing frameworks (Spark preferred)
• Experience with explore/exploit strategies, content cold-start, or counterfactual evaluation methods applied to recommendation
• Experience with content understanding models (NLP, vision, or generative AI) used as ranking features
• Familiarity with creator economy dynamics and how recommendation design affects content quality and creator incentives
• Experience with our stack: PyTorch (TorchRec, Transformers), Ray, Databricks, AWS

Benefits

• Pay 100% of the premiums for both you and your dependents
• Includes Medical, Dental, a Vision HRA, Long Term Disability, Life Insurance & a 401k with competitive match
• Robust mental well-being program through Modern Health, which provides free therapy and coaching for employees & dependents
• Events and company-wide paid breaks throughout the year
• Unlimited PTO and sick time
• 7 years of employment recognized with a paid sabbatical

About Us

Epic Games is a leading interactive entertainment company. For over 30 years we've been making award-winning games and engine technology that empowers others to make visually stunning games and 3D content that bring environments to life like never before. Epic's award-winning Unreal Engine technology not only provides game developers the ability to build high-fidelity, interactive experiences for PC, console, mobile, and VR, it is also a tool being embraced by content creators across a variety of industries such as media and entertainment, automotive, and architectural design.

We strive to build teams of world-class talent. If you share our passion for innovation and excellence, come be a part of something Epic!

Epic Games deeply values diverse teams and an inclusive work culture, and we are proud to be an Equal Opportunity employer. Learn more about our Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) Policy here.

Note to Recruitment Agencies: Epic does not accept any unsolicited resumes or approaches from any unauthorized third party (including recruitment or placement agencies) (i.e., a third party with whom we do not have a negotiated and validly executed agreement). We will not pay any fees to any unauthorized third party. Further details on these matters can be found here.