Machine Learning Engineer - Recommendations & Personalization
Builds and iterates end-to-end ML systems for ShopBack’s personalized shopping recommendations, ranking, and user modeling, blending classic ML with LLM techniques while driving business metrics through A/B testing and experimentation.
- Compensation
- Not disclosed
- Location
- Shenzhen, China
- Work setup
- Onsite
- Seniority
- Not specified
- Employment
- Not specified
- Experience
- 2+ years
- Category
- Ml / AI
- Posted
Skills
Must have
- 2+ years of industrial ML experience shipping/recommending/personalizing/ranking systems for millions of users
- Strong expertise in retrieval, ranking, embeddings, and online experimentation
- Hands-on fine-tuning of open-source models/LLMs (SFT/LoRA/DPO) for ranking/personalization/user modeling
- Builds evaluation sets/harnesses as a default step, not an afterthought
- Understands dataset licensing and provenance for commercial use
- MLOps fundamentals: data pipelines, productionization, monitoring, GPU cost awareness
- Owns model lifecycle: ingestion, training, serving, monitoring, retraining, rollback
- Strong Python, PyTorch, and Hugging Face ecosystem (transformers/PEFT/TRL) familiarity
- Uses agentic AI tools daily for engineering workflows
- Education in quantitative field (CS/Stats/Math) or equivalent practical depth
Nice to have
- Familiarity with modern inference stacks (e.g., vLLM) and cloud training/serving (e.g., AWS SageMaker)
- Batch data stack: Spark/Airflow, cloud training/serving
Full description
Our Journey
The ShopBack Group is Asia-Pacific's leading shopping and rewards platform, trusted by over 20 million active members across 13 markets, including Germany and the United States. Driven by the vision to make every day more rewarding, ShopBack saves members money and time with more ways to earn and more to do with what they earn, and empowers merchants and brand partners to effectively engage its members. Founded in Singapore in 2014, ShopBack now powers over US$5.5 billion in annual sales and half a million transactions a day for more than 20,000 online and in-store partners.
Your Adventure Ahead
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Own recommendation and personalization end-to-end: Build and iterate the ML systems behind ShopBack's personalized shopping experience, recommendations, ranking, user modeling, and CRM intelligence. Own the change end-to-end — dataset, training, offline eval, A/B, rollout — and be measured on offline and online metrics.
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Blend classic ML with modern LLM techniques: Apply fine-tuned open-source models, embedding models, and LLM-based models where they beat classic methods, and know when they don't.
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Ship with evidence: Build evaluation sets and experiment harnesses before shipping models; foster a fast-paced, high-iteration experimentation culture (A/B, interleaving, causal reads).
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Raise the team: Mentor our ML engineers on modern recommendation and LLM practice; your success includes the team's growth, not just your own output.
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Metrics driven: Understand the business and product metrics behind personalization, and drive efforts that move them.
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Handle ambiguity: Navigate loosely defined problems effectively, with or without dedicated Product Manager support.
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Collaboration: Work closely with product, ops, and CRM stakeholders to set and achieve optimal outcomes.
Essentials to Succeed
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Has shipped and iterated recommendation / personalization / ranking or search systems serving millions of users, and can walk through what moved the metrics, what didn't, and why (typically 2+ years of industrial ML experience).
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Strong grounding in retrieval and ranking modeling, embeddings, and online experimentation.
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Hands-on fine-tuning of open-source models/LLMs (SFT / LoRA / DPO) applied to ranking, personalization, or user modeling, and the judgment of when classic methods win.