Staff Machine Learning Engineer, AI R&D

About the role

We are building an elite team, applying frontier technologies to the world's biggest financial problems. We're looking for bold thinkers. Sharp problem-solvers. Builders who are wired to make an impact.

What You'll Do

• Design, build, and ship end-to-end personalization, ranking, and recommendation systems that power core Robinhood products including growth, social feeds, and search — handling the full ML lifecycle from feature engineering through model deployment and monitoring.
• Partner closely with product, data engineering, and platform teams to define technical strategy, scope complex projects, and drive execution across multiple workstreams simultaneously.
• Lead zero-to-one development of new ML capabilities — prototyping, iterating, and scaling models in a high-stakes fintech environment where data quality and regulatory constraints are first-class concerns.
• Evaluate, experiment with, and integrate modern AI paradigms including agentic workflows and LLM fine-tuning into existing ML systems, pushing the team's technical capabilities forward.
• Set the technical bar through architecture reviews, code reviews, and mentorship — helping to elevate the craft and velocity of the broader AI R&D team.

What You Bring

• 10+ years of experience as a Machine Learning Engineer, with a strong foundation in ML fundamentals (ranking, recommendation systems, deep learning, optimization) and a track record of shipping models to production at scale.
• Demonstrated expertise in personalization and recommendation systems — specifically, experience owning these systems end-to-end in a high-traffic, data-rich environment (fintech, e-commerce, social, or equivalent).
• Proven ability to deliver projects from zero to one: you've taken ambiguous, high-impact problems and built production-grade solutions with measurable results.
• Exposure to or hands-on experience with agentic systems, LLM fine-tuning, or other modern AI paradigms — and the technical judgment to know when (and when not) to apply them.
• A Master's degree in Computer Science, Statistics, or a related technical field, or equivalent professional experience; strong coding skills in Python and familiarity with ML infrastructure tooling.

What We Offer

• Challenging, high-impact work to grow your career
• Performance driven compensation with multipliers for outsized impact, bonus programs, equity ownership, and 401(k) matching
• Top Tier benefits to fuel your work, including 100% paid health insurance for employees with 90% coverage for dependents
• Access to the best AI tools on the market and continuous AI skill-building for every employee, technical or not
• Lifestyle wallet - a highly flexible benefits spending account for wellness, learning, and more
• Employer-paid life & disability insurance, fertility benefits, and mental health benefits
• Time off to recharge including company holidays, paid time off, sick time, parental leave, and more!