Senior Machine Learning Engineer

About the role

Realize your potential by joining the leading performance-driven advertising company and a proud Great Place to Work® Certified employer in the US

As a Sr Machine Learning Engineer on Taboola’s R&D Team in Downtown Los Angeles, utilizing some of the latest technology and tools, you will work on the recommendation and ranking algorithms that drive Realize — Taboola's performance advertising platform serving 600M+ daily active users.

The models you build directly influence campaign performance and revenue outcomes for advertisers worldwide.

To thrive in this role, you'll need:

- Bachelor or advanced degree in a relevant field, ideally Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or Computational Economics

- 5+ years of hands-on experience in Python and Java

- Proficiency with ML frameworks (e.g., PyTorch, Tensorflow)

- Experience with recommendation systems, ranking algorithms, or personalization at scale

- Experience taking end-to-end ownership of ML systems: design, build, ship, measure, and maintain — using AI-assisted “vibe coding” tools (e.g., Cursor, Claude, GitHub Copilot)

- Experience building automated evaluation harnesses and test frameworks for ML systems — defining benchmarks, baselines, and guardrails that let a team ship confidently and repeatedly

- Ability to communicate technical findings clearly, and to collaborate effectively across teams (including early morning or evening syncs with our Tel Aviv team)

Bonus points if you have:

- Experience with Karpathy's autoresearch (MIT), AutoML or any other agentic tools for ML experiments

How you’ll make an impact:

- Design and build predictive customer behavior models for targeting and personalization

- Implement the applicable Machine Learning or statistics based algorithm for prediction and optimization and deliver the trained model to production

- Take end-to-end ownership: design, build, ship, measure, and maintain models and the services around them—rapidly prototyping and delivering complete projects/products using AI-assisted “vibe coding” workflows.

- Act as a Harness Engineer: build the evaluation harnesses, automated testing frameworks, benchmarks, and guardrails that let the team experiment, measure model quality, and ship AI/ML systems safely and repeatedly, following a TDD process.

- Present findings to the product team and technical team leads in a clear and actionable way.

- Build and maintain code to populate HDFS, Hadoop with log from Kafka or data loaded from SQL production systems

- Design, build and support algorithms of data transformation, conversion, computation on Hadoop, Spark and other distributed Big Data Systems

Why Taboola?

If you ask Taboolars what they love about working here, they’ll tell you that they’ve been empowered to realize their full potential while growing and learning from and with smart and talented people. They’ll also share more about: