Staff Machine Learning Engineer – Search
At FanDuel, data is the heartbeat of our organisation. As a Staff Machine Learning Engineer, you will help unlock the full potential of our vast amounts of real-time and relational data. You will own critical production ML systems across real-time personalisation, delivering billions of recommendations per day, and search, powering high-scale, low-latency discovery experiences for customers across our sportsbook and gaming products. You will tackle complex, still-evolving challenges in ranking, relevance, retrieval, and online decisioning to provide our business with insight and our customers with world-class personalised experiences.
Collaboration is at the core of your role. You’ll be the linchpin between engineering teams working downstream to build out our online application and upstream to land necessary data for feature engineering. You’ll also be working with Data Scientists and Analysts to productionise, analyse, and validate AI powered insights. You will be asked to help organise, model, and present our data as a coherent product and offer it to our stakeholders, providing a common information framework that allows FanDuel to intelligently react to what is happening on the field and in the marketplace.
- Designing and implementing intelligent search systems incorporating typeahead search, vector search and ML personalisation signals to optimise relevance and user experience, with end-to-end ownership from ideation to production.
- Building and scaling multi-layer serving architectures for ML and GenAI/LLM models, making key architectural decisions in ambiguous problem spaces.
- Driving the design and evolution of platform capabilities (e.g. CLI, SDK, Infra Automation, Platform Applications) to streamline ML and GenAI/LLM application development and deployment lifecycle across teams.
- Contributing to technical strategy and influencing adoption of ML and GenAI/LLM platform solutions across partner engineering teams.
- Applying best practices in data security, privacy (e.g. GDPR, CCPA), governance, and data testing frameworks to ensure reliable and compliant data products.
- Owning the continuous integration and delivery of production-grade data and ML systems with a focus on scalability, reliability, and cost-efficiency.
- Setting engineering standards and mentoring junior engineers, elevating team practices in system design, reliability, automation, data quality, and operational excellence.
- 7+ years of relevant experience developing code in one or more core programming languages (Python, Java, etc.) (required)
- 4+ years of experience designing and building scalable software architectures, including systems supporting ML, Search or LLM workloads (required)
- 2+ years of experience implementing vector search, semantic search, or embedding-based retrieval systems (RAG workflows) for production ML or AI applications with vector store such as AWS OpenSearch, Elasticsearch, etc (required)
- 2+ years of experience building platform components and frameworks improving ML/AI development and deployment efficiency (required)
- 1+ years of experience driving technical direction, making architectural trade-offs, and influencing engineering decisions across teams (required)
- 1+ years of experience collaborating cross-functionally, working with leadership and influencing and driving partner teams to adopt platform capabilities and best practices (required)
- 1+ years of experience conducting design reviews and setting engineering standards within a team (required)
- Experience with data and streaming technologies (e.g., Spark, Flink, Kafka, Airflow, Terraform) (required)
- Experience working in cloud environments such as AWS, GCP, or Azure (required)
- Experience designing and building data pipelines for production ML and GenAI/LLM systems (required)
- Strong understanding of data structures, distributed systems, and software engineering principles (required)
- Demonstrated ability to independently own and deliver complex technical projects end-to-end in ambiguous environments (required)
- Ability to communicate technical concepts and insights effectively through dashboards, data models, or design artifacts (required)
- Track record of mentoring engineers and elevating team-wide engineering practices and technical quality (required)
- 1+ years of experience working with typeahead / autocomplete systems and integrating ML signals into query understanding or ranking workflows (preferred)
- 1+ years of experience combining outputs from multiple retrieval systems (e.g., vector search + typeahead + personalisation models) to improve relevance (preferred)
- 1+ years of experience deploying ML and GenAI/LLM models under constraints of scalability, correctness, and maintainability in production environments (preferred)
- Hands-on experience with ML frameworks (Scikit-learn, PyTorch, TensorFlow, etc.) and familiarity with LLM frameworks (preferred)
- Hands-on experience with ML and GenAI/LLM platforms (e.g., SageMaker, Bedrock, Databricks, etc.) (preferred)
- Medical, vision, and dental insurance (some as low as $0 per paycheck) that include programs for fertility and family planning, mental health support, and fitness benefits.
- Generous paid time off (PTO & sick leave).
- Annual bonus and long-term incentive opportunities (based on performance).
- 401k with up to a 5% match.
- Commuter benefits.
- Pet insurance.
- 14 paid company holidays.
- Life insurance and disability insurance.
FanDuel Group is an innovative sports-tech entertainment company that is changing the way consumers engage with their favorite sports, teams, and leagues. The premier gaming destination in the North America, FanDuel Group consists of a portfolio of leading brands across gaming, sports betting, daily fantasy sports, advance-deposit wagering, and TV/media, including FanDuel, Stardust Casino and TVG. The company is based in New York with US offices in Los Angeles, Atlanta, and Jersey City, as well as global offices in Canada and Scotland. The company’s affiliates have offices worldwide, including in Ireland, Portugal, Romania, and Australia. FanDuel Group is a subsidiary of Flutter Entertainment, the world's largest sports betting and gaming operator with a portfolio of globally recognized brands and traded on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE: FLUT).