Whatnot
Machine Learning Engineer, Applied Research
$210K–$300K
New York, NY · Hybrid · Full-time · Posted Sep 17, 2026
- Experience
- 5+ years of industry experience.
About the job
Lead applied research and build machine-learning models and experiments to understand and improve marketplace dynamics, including auctions, discovery, and long-term outcomes.
What you'll do
- Lead research projects on marketplace simulation, auction and allocation mechanics, experimentation, and related topics; take ideas from hypothesis through production experiments.
- Build models of marketplace behavior and develop methods to evaluate changes, including off-policy evaluation and robust experiment designs.
- Contribute to publications, open-source work, and public benchmarks.
What they ask for
- 5+ years of industry experience building and deploying ML models to solve user problems at scale.
- Depth in at least one of recommendation systems, causal inference, off-policy evaluation, reinforcement learning and bandits, auction or mechanism design, or marketplace experimentation.
- Track record applying scientific methods to real-world problems using consumer-scale data.
- Advanced proficiency in Python, SQL, and common ML frameworks; strong grounding in applied statistics, experiment design, and theoretical machine learning.
Nice to have
- Experience in two-sided marketplaces, ads and auction systems, or pricing.
- Experience building simulators or economic models of platform behavior.
Pay
$210,000k/year to $300,000k/year USD base salary
Tools
Python, SQL, PyTorch, XGBoost
AI focus
Applied machine-learning research for marketplace simulation, auctions and allocation, discovery, experimentation, and long-term outcome modeling.
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative