Senior Staff Machine Learning Engineer

Patreon is a media and community platform where over 300,000 creators give their biggest fans access to exclusive work and experiences. We offer creators a variety of ways to engage with their fans and build a lasting business including: paid memberships, free memberships, community chats, live video, and selling to fans directly with one-time purchases.

Ultimately our goal is simple: fund the creative class. And we're leaders in that space, with:

• $10 billion+ generated by creators since Patreon's inception

• 100 million+ free memberships for fans who may not be ready to pay just yet, and

• 25 million+ paid memberships on Patreon today.

We're continuing to invest heavily in building the best creator platform with the best team in the creator economy and are looking for a Senior Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Relevance to support our mission.

This role is based in New York or San Francisco and open to those who are able to be in-office 2 days per week on a hybrid work model.

About the Team

The Relevance team builds the intelligence layer that powers discovery, personalization, and creator-fan connection across Patreon. We’re responsible for ML-driven systems behind search, recommendations, notifications, and content relevance — helping millions of fans find the right creators, and helping creators grow sustainable audiences.

Our engineers work end-to-end across the ML stack: from data analysis and feature engineering to model training, deployment, and observability. We partner closely with product, infrastructure, and design to ensure our models don’t just perform well in theory — they deliver meaningful experiences in the product.

This team is growing quickly and investing in foundational relevance systems that will power the next decade of Patreon’s creator economy.

About the Role

As a Senior Staff Machine Learning Engineer in Relevance, you’ll define and lead the technical direction for Patreon’s recommendation and search systems. You’ll architect large-scale ML systems that determine what fans see, how they discover creators, and how creators grow their audiences.

You’ll own projects from prototype to production, including the data, modeling, and backend components. You’ll also build tools and simple frontend prototypes to visualize model results and demonstrate how relevance models surface in the product. This ability to show how ML decisions appear in the user experience is key to how we connect technical work to creator impact.

You’ll mentor other ML engineers, influence multi-team technical strategy, and collaborate with cross-functional leaders across Product, Data Science, and Infrastructure. Your work will define the standards and systems that future ML teams at Patreon build upon.

In this role, you will:

• Design and build large-scale ranking, search, and recommendation systems that power discovery across the platform.

• Architect and productionize end-to-end ML pipelines (data ingestion, feature generation, model training, evaluation, deployment, and monitoring).

• Prototype visualizations for the impact of new ML models to help bridge collaboration with product and design partners.

• Develop embedding systems and retrieval models that serve millions of users in real time.

• Establish and evolve ML observability and performance monitoring for relevance metrics.

• Partner with cross-functional leaders to align on roadmap, goals, and impact.

• Mentor and guide engineers, fostering a high bar for technical excellence and experimentation.

About You

You’re a senior technical leader who thrives in building systems from 0→1. You’re deeply familiar with the challenges of scaling search and recommendation models, and you enjoy operating at the intersection of modeling, systems, and product.

You have experience bringing ML models to production at scale — and you care just as much about how they impact users as how they perform in offline metrics. You communicate clearly, love mentoring, and are motivated by building systems that empower creators.

Qualifications:

• 8+ years of professional experience in applied machine learning, with a focus on search, ranking, or recommendation systems.

• Proven experience designing and deploying production ML systems serving millions of users.

• Strong programming skills in Python.

• Proficiency in backend development and experience integrating ML systems into production environments.

• Ability to prototype or visualize ML outputs in interactive UI contexts to help teams interpret model impact.

• Expertise in building and maintaining data pipelines, feature stores, and model observability systems.

• Deep understanding of embedding-based retrieval, ranking algorithms, and personalization architectures.

• Strong collaboration skills — able to partner effectively with engineers, designers, and PMs.

• Experience mentoring senior engineers and driving cross-team technical alignment.

• Master’s or PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or related field, or equivalent experience.

Bonus:

• Experience at a large-scale consumer platform with search or recommendation systems.

• Prior experience building internal tools or interactive demos for model interpretability.

• Strong interest in creative ecosystems or content discovery platforms.

About Patreon

Patreon powers creators to do what they love and get paid by the people who love what they do. Our team is passionate about making this mission and our core values come to life every day in our work. Through this work, our Patronauts:

• Put Creators First | They’re the reason we’re here. When creators win, we win.

• Build with Craft | We sign our name to every deliverable, just like the creators we serve.

• Make it Happen | We don’t quit. We learn and deliver.

• Win Together | We grow as individuals. We win as a team.

We hire talented and passionate people from different backgrounds because workplace diversity and inclusion is critical to our ability to serve creators worldwide. If you’re excited about a role but your past experience doesn’t match with every bullet point outlined above, we strongly encourage you to apply anyway. If you’re a creator at heart, are energized by our mission, and share our company values, we’d love to hear from you.

Patreon is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We provide employment opportunities without regard to age, race, color, ancestry, national origin, religion, disability, sex, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, veteran status, or any other protected class. If you need a reasonable accommodation during the interview process, please let us know via email at accommodations@patreon.

Patreon offers a competitive benefits package including and not limited to salary, equity plans, healthcare, flexible time off, company holidays and recharge days, commuter benefits, lifestyle stipends, learning and development stipends, patronage, parental leave, and 401k plan with matching.

Patreon operates under a hybrid work model, where employees based in office locations are expected to come into the office two days per week, excluding sick time and paid leave. The goal of this policy is to be intentional about the in-person time we spend together to strengthen the feeling of community at Patreon. Candidates hired into remote-eligible roles are not expected to meet the same requirements.

At Patreon, we believe in fair and transparent pay. In compliance with New York and California pay transparency laws, we are sharing the expected salary range for this role.

The posted salary range is dependent on the location and the level. This range may encompass multiple levels within the role’s job family. The final offer will be based on candidate’s experience, skills, competencies, and geographic location, aligning with the appropriate job level within Patreon’s leveling framework. For remote employees located outside CA and NY, salary may vary based on location and local market conditions.

Patreon reserves the right to modify or update compensation and benefits at any time.