Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Developer Advocacy

Details

Grafana Labs is hiring a Senior ML Engineer for an applied product data science role focused on an interactive learning recommendation system.

Grafana Labs is building an Interactive Learning system, an open source, in-product learning experience that helps users learn and succeed without leaving Grafana. A central part of that vision is a personalized recommendation system that helps each user discover the next guide, action, or product experience most likely to help them succeed.

Today, the Interactive Learning tool includes a rule-based recommendation engine that provides useful contextual recommendations. We are hiring an ML Engineer to lead its evolution into an increasingly personalized, continuously improving system driven by real-time product behavior, content metadata, customer context, and experimentation.

This is a fully remote position and we're considering candidates in the US. You will personally build, deploy, and operate recommendation models, design experiments, establish evaluation methodology, and define the scientific roadmap. You will partner closely with software engineers who own the production recommender codebase and with an existing Data Analyst who supports measurement, instrumentation, and analysis across Developer Advocacy.

Responsibilities

Evolve the Interactive Learning Plugin's recommendation system

• Develop increasingly personalized approaches to candidate selection, ranking, sequencing, and next-best-action recommendations.
• Own a real-time recommendation service.

Build and operate applied models

• Develop, validate, version, monitor, and iterate on models used by the recommendation system.
• Own model training & serving.

Define what recommendation quality means

• Develop offline, online, and longitudinal measures of recommendation performance.
• Own feature pipelines, monitoring of the model and architecture.

Ship incremental improvements

• Use the data and infrastructure available today while identifying the instrumentation and platform capabilities needed tomorrow.
• Integrate improvements into the existing recommender rather than waiting for a complete replacement system.

Partner across disciplines

• Work closely with software engineers & data analysts to productionize models and integrate them safely into the recommender service.
• Partner with the Product Analytics team on metric definitions, instrumentation, data quality, dashboards, and experiment analysis.
• Collaborate with Developer Advocacy, Docs, Product, Engineering, GTM, and other teams to translate ambiguous needs into testable hypotheses and measurable product decisions.
• Explain modeling choices, tradeoffs, uncertainty, and results clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences.

Requirements

Recommendation and personalization science

• Built recommendation, ranking, search, matching, propensity, or next-best-action systems.
• Comfortable beginning with simple, explainable approaches when they are the best way to learn.

Distributed systems and communication protocols

• HTTP/gRPC, streaming, Go/TypeScript previous experience in distributed systems.

Applied model ownership

• Personally built, validated, monitored, and iterated on models used in a product or operational environment.
• Can work effectively in version-controlled codebases and collaborate with engineers on production implementation.

Product thinking and communication

• Strong product thinker and technical communicator.
• Can take an ambitious and ambiguous objective, identify the most important unknowns, and create a sequence of models and experiments that steadily improves the product.

Bonus Points For

• Experience with content, education, onboarding, or learning recommendation systems.
• Experience with SaaS product telemetry and customer-account data.
• Experience using warehouse-scale behavioral data.
• Experience with directed graphs, sequence models, or prerequisite-aware recommendations.
• Experience with contextual bandits or other exploration strategies.
• Familiarity with Grafana or the broader observability ecosystem.
• Experience with open source software or transparent development practices.
• Experience working with privacy, fairness, explainability, or responsible personalization constraints.

Compensation & Rewards

• In the United States, the base compensation range for this role is $154,445 - $185,334.
• Includes Restricted Stock Units (RSUs).