Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Discovery Recommendations

About this role

<div class="content-intro"><h2>WHAT MAKES US EPIC?</h2> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p></div><h2>ANALYTICS</h2> <h3><strong>What We Do</strong></h3> <p>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.</p> <h3><strong>What You'll Do</strong></h3> <p>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.</p> <p>You'll work across the full recommendation stack: candidate generation, content ranking, impression allocation, and real-time reranking.</p> <p>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.</p> <h3><strong>In this role, you will</strong></h3> <ul> <li>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</li> <li>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</li> <li>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</li> <li>Collaborate with analytics and content quality teams on ranking signals including genre classification, creator credibility, and content quality metrics</li> <li>Own ML infrastructure decisions: choosing the right tradeoffs between batch, near-real-time, and streaming serving architectures</li> </ul> <h3><strong>What we're looking for</strong></h3> <ul> <li>5+ years of experience building production recommendation or ranking systems, ideally in a UGC, marketplace, or content discovery context</li> <li>Experience with deep learning for information retrieval and multi-stage recommendation pipelines (candidate generation, scoring, reranking)</li> <li>Demonstrated ability to design and analyze A/B experiments, with awareness of biases inherent to recommendation systems</li> <li>Strong Python engineering skills with experience in PyTorch and large-scale data processing frameworks (Spark preferred)</li> <li>Comfort working in a cloud-based ML environment</li> <li>Experience with explore/exploit strategies, content cold-start, or counterfactual evaluation methods applied to recommendation</li> <li>Experience with content understanding models (NLP, vision, or generative AI) used as ranking features</li> <li>Familiarity with creator economy dynamics and how recommendation design affects content quality and creator incentives</li> <li>Experience with our stack: PyTorch (TorchRec, Transformers), Ray, Databricks, AWS</li> <li>Passion for video games and/or experience with gaming analytics</li> </ul> <p><strong>This role is open to multiple locations across the US (including CA, NYC, & WA).</strong></p> <h2>EPIC JOB + EPIC BENEFITS = EPIC LIFE</h2> <p><span data-sheets-userformat="{"2":13201,"3":{"1":0},"7":{"1":[{"1":2,"2":0,"5":{"1":2,"2":13421772}},{"1":0,"2":0,"3":3},{"1":1,"2":0,"4":1}]},"10":0,"11":4,"12":0,"15":"Roboto","16":10}">Our intent is to cover all things that are medically necessary and improve the quality of life. We pay 100% of the premiums for both you and your dependents. Our coverage includes Medical, Dental, a Vision HRA, Long Term Disability, Life Insurance & a 401k with competitive match. We also offer a robust mental well-being program through Modern Health, which provides free therapy and coaching for employees & dependents. Throughout the year we celebrate our employees with events and company-wide paid breaks. We offer unlimited PTO and sick time and recognize individuals for 7 years of employment with a paid sabbatical.</span></p> <h2><span style="font-weight: 400;">Pay Transparency Information</span></h2> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The expected annual base pay range(s) for this position are detailed below. Each base pay range is relevant only for individuals who are residents…