About Careertakes

👉 Important disclosure: Careertakes is a third-party recruiting platform supporting this hiring process. If selected, you will be employed directly by our client, Advertising Services.

Applicants for this role may also receive access to additional matched opportunities through the Careertakes platform.

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What You’ll Do

Confidential Client is hiring a Software Engineer II focused on Recommendations to contribute to a recommendations platform that powers personalized experiences across channels (email, SMS, onsite, agentic assistants). As a member of the Recommendations Platform team in Boston, MA (onsite), you will help design, build, and operate backend systems, data pipelines, and production inference services that deliver reliable, fast, and measurable recommendation experiences.

• Contribute to the architecture and implementation of backend services and APIs that serve recommendations and ranking features across product surfaces.
• Build and maintain large-scale data processing pipelines (batch and/or streaming) that transform event and catalog data into high-quality features for models.
• Collaborate with ML engineers and product stakeholders to productionize models—define interfaces, feature contracts, and deployment patterns for batch and real-time inference.
• Develop and evolve the vector database and similarity-search capabilities used for semantic recommendations and search.
• Ensure observability across services and data pipelines (metrics, tracing, logging, dashboards) to maintain correctness, explainability, and low latency.
• Design and run A/B tests and experimentation to measure recommendation quality and business impact; interpret results and feed learnings back into systems.
• Participate in on-call rotations and incident response; drive post-incident improvements to resilience and operability.
• Use AI tools responsibly to accelerate development workflows (automating tests, smarter monitoring, debugging aids).
• Mentor junior engineers and help define best practices for distributed systems, data frameworks, and ML integration.

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Location & Work Arrangement

• Location: Boston, MA (onsite; role typically expects presence in Boston office — historically posted as onsite 5x/week)
• This position may require limited travel (up to ~10%) for onboarding, team meetings, or conferences.

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Minimum Qualifications

• 2+ years of professional software engineering experience focused on backend and distributed systems at scale.
• Strong Python proficiency; willingness to work with other languages where appropriate.
• Experience with cloud-native architectures (AWS preferred) and container orchestration (Kubernetes). Comfortable managing infrastructure and CI/CD as part of development.
• Familiarity designing and querying relational, analytical, and NoSQL datastores (Postgres, MySQL, data warehouses, Redis, vector stores).
• Experience with data-driven decision making and experimentation (A/B test design, instrumentation, interpretation).
• Practical knowledge of modern DevOps practices (CI/CD, monitoring, alerting) for large-scale data and model-serving systems.
• Proven track record of owning features end-to-end (design → rollout → monitoring → iteration).
• Strong collaboration and communication skills across technical and non-technical partners.
• Comfortable integrating and exploring AI/ML tools in engineering workflows responsibly.

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Nice to Have

• Previous experience building product recommendation systems, personalization, ranking, or search features.
• Experience with big-data frameworks (Apache Spark, Flink, Beam) or stream processing.
• Familiarity with ML systems and production model integration (feature stores, online/offline parity, model deployment and monitoring).
• Experience with distributed compute or serving frameworks (Ray, custom serving infrastructures).
• Background in e-commerce, marketing technology, or consumer personalization products.

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Compensation & Benefits

• Base pay range for US locations (posted): $116,000—$174,000 USD (base salary offered depends on skills, experience, and work location).
• Total compensation may include equity, variable pay, sign-on awards, and comprehensive benefits where eligible.
• Your recruiter can provide more details about the specific salary and compensation for the Boston location during the process.

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Legal & State Notices

• Massachusetts applicants: It is unlawful in Massachusetts to require or administer a lie detector test as a condition of employment. An employer who violates this law shall be subject to criminal penalties and civil liability.
• Confidential Client is committed to equal opportunity and does not discriminate on the basis of protected characteristics under applicable law.

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Why Join

• Work on high-impact systems that power personalization across channels at scale.
• Collaborate closely with ML engineers, product, and data teams to bring models into production and measure real business outcomes.
• Opportunity to mentor others, shape platform-level architecture, and introduce responsible AI practices into engineering workflows.

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Equal Opportunity & Hiring Transparency

Careertakes and our client are Equal Opportunity Employers committed to building a diverse and inclusive workforce. We prohibit discrimination or harassment of any kind. To support a fair and efficient hiring process, AI tools may be used to assist with application review or resume screening. These tools do not replace human decision-making. Final hiring decisions are made by people.

If you have questions about how your data is used, please contact us directly.