Machine Learning Engineer

Machine Learning Engineer at Shopify

Join Shopify's innovative team as we work on the development and implementation of state of the art HSTU models (Hierarchical Sequential Transduction Unit) to recommend the best growth drivers and action for merchants and buyers. You'll play a pivotal role in solving high-impact data problems that directly improve merchant success and consumer experience.

As a Machine Learning Engineer lead or individual contributor, you'll be at the forefront of building AI solutions that anticipate both merchant needs and personalization for 100M+ shoppers.

Key Responsibilities:

• Develop and deploy Generative AI, natural language processing, and HSTU-based recommendation models at scale
• Design and implement scalable AI/ML system architectures supporting models
• Build sophisticated inference pipelines that process billions of events and deliver real-time recommendations
• Implement data pipelines for model training, fine-tuning, and evaluation across diverse data sources (merchant events, consumer interactions, payment sequences)
• Experiment with novel architectures
• Optimize for production through advanced techniques like negative sampling, ANN search, and distributed GPU training
• Collaborate cross-functionally with product teams, data scientists, and infrastructure engineers to deliver measurable business impact
• Communicate effectively with both technical and non-technical audiences, translating complex ML concepts into actionable insights

Qualifications:

• Mastery in recommendation systems, Gen AI or LLMs
• End-to-end experience in training, evaluating, testing, and deploying machine learning products at scale.
• Experience in building data pipelines and driving ETL design decisions using disparate data sources.
• Proficiency in Python, shell scripting, streaming and batch data pipelines, vector databases, DBT, BigQuery, BigTable, or equivalent, and orchestration tools.
• Experience with running machine learning in parallel environments (e.g., distributed clusters, GPU optimization).
• This role may require on-call work.

At Shopify, we pride ourselves on moving quickly—not just in shipping, but in our hiring process as well. If you’re ready to apply, please be prepared to interview with us within the week. Our goal is to complete the entire interview loop within 30 days. You will be expected to complete a pair programming interview, using your own IDE.

This role may require on-call work.

Ready to redefine e-commerce through AI innovation? Join the team that’s making commerce better for everyone.

About Shopify:

Opportunity is not evenly distributed. Shopify puts independence within reach for anyone with a dream to start a business. We propel entrepreneurs and enterprises to scale the heights of their potential. Since 2006, we’ve grown to over 8,300 employees and generated over $1 trillion in sales for millions of merchants in 175 countries.

This is life-defining work that directly impacts people’s lives as much as it transforms your own. This is putting the power of the few in the hands of the many, is a future with more voices rather than fewer, and is creating more choices instead of an elite option.

About You:

Moving at our pace brings a lot of change, complexity, and ambiguity—and a little bit of chaos. Shopifolk thrive on that and are comfortable being uncomfortable. That means Shopify is not the right place for everyone.

Before you apply, consider if you can:

• Care deeply about what you do and about making commerce better for everyone
• Excel by seeking professional and personal hypergrowth
• Keep up with an unrelenting pace (the week, not the quarter)
• Be resilient and resourceful in face of ambiguity and thrive on (rather than endure) change
• Bring critical thought and opinion
• Put AI agents and tools to work on the tasks they're built for, and focus on the work only humans can do
• Embrace differences and disagreement to get shit done and move forward
• Work digital-first for your daily work

We may use AI-enabled tools to screen, select, and assess applications. All AI outputs are reviewed and validated by our recruitment team.

Key skills/competency

• Machine Learning
• Generative AI
• Recommendation Systems
• Natural Language Processing
• Scalable AI Architectures
• Data Pipelines
• Python
• Distributed Computing
• BigQuery
• Real-time Systems