Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Discovery Recommendations

About Us

At the core of Epic’s success are talented, passionate people. Epic prides itself on creating a collaborative, welcoming, and creative environment. Whether it’s building award-winning games or crafting engine technology that enables others to make visually stunning interactive experiences, we’re always innovating. Being Epic means being a part of a team that continually strives to do right by our community and users. We’re constantly innovating to raise the bar of engine and game development.

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 provides game developers the ability to build high-fidelity, interactive experiences for PC, console, mobile, and VR, and is also embraced by content creators across industries such as media and entertainment, automotive, and architectural design.

About the Role

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. You'll work across the full recommendation stack: candidate generation, content ranking, impression allocation, and real-time reranking. Unlike recommendation systems that operate over a stable catalog, you're working with a massive, rapidly changing content library where new experiences are published daily, quality signals are sparse, and the system's own outputs shape the data it learns from.

Responsibilities

• 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) and build the user representation systems that power personalized discovery
• 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

Requirements

• 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)
• Comfort working in a cloud-based ML environment
• 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
• Passion for video games and/or experience with gaming analytics

This role is open to multiple locations across the US (including CA, NYC, & WA).

Benefits

• Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage with 100% premiums paid for you and your dependents
• Vision HRA (Health Reimbursement Arrangement)
• Long-term disability and life insurance
• 401k with competitive match
• Robust mental well-being program through Modern Health, offering free therapy and coaching for employees and dependents
• Unlimited PTO and sick time
• Company-wide paid breaks and events throughout the year
• Paid sabbatical for employees with 7 years of employment

Pay

New York City Base Pay Range: $232,666—$341,243 USD

California Base Pay Range: $209,399—$307,119 USD

Washington Base Pay Range: $190,363—$279,199 USD