Principal Applied Scientist/Machine Learning Engineer

mParticle by Rokt is widely recognized as one of the leading customer data platforms, serving hundreds of global brands and helping them turn data to insights and insights to action. Built on top of end-to-end streaming architecture, we are committed to empowering businesses to deliver personalized and engaging experiences to their customers across all screens and devices. We believe that the opportunity to help teams activate insights from their customer data to deliver more relevant and adaptive experiences is more important than ever. In January 2025 mParticle merged with Rokt and became mParticle by Rokt. Together, our AI and ML-powered Rokt Brain and ecommerce Rokt Network will power more than 6.5 billion transactions, connecting 400 million customers across the world’s leading companies.

We are Rokt, a hyper-growth ecommerce leader. Rokt is the global leader in ecommerce, unlocking real-time relevance in the moment that matters most. Rokt’s AI Brain and ecommerce Network powers billions of transactions connecting hundreds of millions of customers, and is trusted to do this by the world’s leading companies.

We are a team of builders helping smart businesses find innovative ways to meet customer needs and generate incremental revenue. Leading companies drive 10-50% of additional revenue—and often all their profits—from the extra products or services they sell. This economic edge unleashes a world of possibilities for growth and innovation.

The mParticle by Rokt engineering team builds best-in-class ecommerce technology that provides personalized and relevant experiences for customers globally and empowers marketers with sophisticated, AI-driven tooling to understand consumers better. Our bespoke platform handles millions of transactions per day. It considers billions of data points which give engineers the opportunity to build technology at scale, collaborate across teams, and gain exposure to a wide range of technology.

At Rokt, we practice transparency in career paths and compensation. At Rokt, we believe in transparency, which is why we have a well-defined career ladder with transparent compensation and clear career paths based on competency and ability. Rokt’stars constantly strive to raise the bar, pushing the envelope of what is possible.

We are looking for a Principal Applied Scientist/Machine Learning Engineer

Target total compensation ranges from $515,000 - $650,000, including a fixed annual salary of $315,000 - $340,000, an employee equity plan grant, and world-class benefits. 

Equity grants are issued in good faith, subject to company policies, board approval, and individual eligibility.

As a Principal Applied Scientist / Machine Learning Engineer, you bring deep expertise in machine learning and a strong track record of driving impact. You will work closely with engineering leaders and senior stakeholders to tackle complex relevancy challenges, taking projects from research to full-scale deployment. Your work will focus on designing, developing, and deploying proprietary machine learning models that power key business initiatives.

In this role, you will lead cutting-edge ML research and production deployment of high-impact models, advancing recommender systems, conversion optimization, user experience enhancement, and multi-task learning architectures.

This is a hands-on, individual contributor role for a seasoned expert who thrives in solving complex ML problems at scale. You will design and implement advanced ML architectures, ensuring they are robust, efficient, and impactful in a fast-paced, high-performance environment.

About the role:

• Develop and implement machine learning models to solve high-impact business problems.
• Design and optimize scalable ML pipelines and infrastructure for production environments.
• Conduct applied ML research, prototype new modeling approaches, and rigorously test innovations.
• Evaluate and improve model performance, ensuring robustness, scalability, and interpretability.
• Translate complex business needs into practical ML solutions, collaborating with product and engineering teams.

Stay ahead of emerging ML trends, contributing to knowledge sharing through tech talks, brown bags, and best practice evangelism.

Requirements

About You:

• PhD or Master’s in Computer Science, Statistics, Mathematics, or related field with specialization in ML, AI, or Information Retrieval.
• 10+ years of industry experience building production-grade ML systems.
• Deep expertise in at least two:
• Reinforcement Learning (Bandits, Policy Optimization)
• Multi-Task Learning & Mixture of Experts (MMOE, PLE, DCN)
• Deep Learning Architectures (Transformers, Graph Neural Networks)
• Bayesian Methods & Probabilistic Modeling
• ML for Ads, E-commerce, or Two-Sided Marketplaces (big plus!)
• Proven ability to drive impact across multiple teams and organizations.

Bonus points if you are familiar with any of the following architectures or have experience with the models mentioned in this benchmark: DCNV2, MMOE, Deep & Wide, ESMM, xDeepFM, and GDCN.s

Benefits

About Rokt’stars:

As a mission-driven, hyper-growth community of curious explorers, our ambition is to unlock real-time relevancy in ecommerce and beyond. Our bias for action means we are not afraid to quickly venture into uncharted territories, take risks, or challenge the status quo; in doing so we either win or learn. We work together as one aligned team never letting egos get in the way of brilliant ideas. We value diversity, transparency, and smart humble people who enjoy building a disruptive business together. We pride ourselves on being a force for good as we make the world better. 

About The Benefits:

We leverage best-in-class technology and market-leading innovation in AI and ML, with all of that being underlined by building and maintaining a fantastic and inclusive culture where people can be their authentic selves, and offering a great list of perks and benefits to go with it:

• Accelerate your career. We offer roadmaps to leadership and an annual training allowance
• Become a shareholder. Every Rokt’star gets equity in the company
• Enjoy catered lunch every day and healthy snacks in the office. Plus join the gym on us! 
• Access generous retirement plans like a 4% dollar-for-dollar 401K matching plan and get fully funded premium health insurance! 
• Extra leave (bonus annual leave, sabbatical leave etc.) 
• See the world! We have offices in New York, Seattle, Sydney, Tokyo and London

We believe we’re better together. We love spending time together and are in the office most days (teams are in the office 4 days per week). We also get that you need to balance your life and your commitments so you have the flexibility to manage your own hours and can spend up to a week of every quarter working from anywhere.

We at Rokt choose to create a company that is as diverse and inclusive as the world we live in by attracting, growing & keeping the best talent. Equal employment opportunities are available to all applicants without regard to race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.

If this sounds like a role you’d enjoy, apply here, and you’ll hear from our recruiting team.