Engineering Manager, Recommender Systems at Raya at Raya

As an Engineering Manager for Recommender Systems, you will lead the team responsible for building the backend retrieval and ranking infrastructure that powers recommendations at Raya. You will collaborate closely with the Head of Machine Learning to define the technical strategy, ensuring our members have the best possible experience on the core surfaces of our product.

Responsibilities

• Build, coach, and retain a high-performing backend team specializing in recommender systems.
• Own reliable, low-latency production systems, including observability and incident response for recommendations.
• Proactively catch regressions in latency, quality, or fairness before they impact users.
• Create and execute a technical strategy that is deeply rooted in product intuition and empathy for the end-user experience.
• Partner with the Machine Learning team to define technical roadmaps.
• Balance the need for user-facing improvements with necessary investments in infrastructure, reliability, and experimentation.
• Work alongside Data Science to co-own experimentation processes, tools, and best practices.

Qualifications

• Minimum of 3 years of experience managing engineers, including direct responsibility for hiring, performance management, career development, and delivery.
• Proven experience leading or building production recommender systems at scale.
• Hands-on depth in high throughput, low latency distributed systems designed to serve millions of users.
• Expertise in Go, Java/JVM, or a similar backend programming language, along with Postgres, and experience with AWS or GCP, and Kubernetes.

What Sets You Apart

• Experience working with social networks or two-sided marketplaces that operate on a subscription model, understanding concepts like reciprocal interest, exposure, liquidity, and the long term retentive value created by great recommendations.
• Familiarity with how machine learning and Artificial Intelligence integrate within modern recommender systems.
• Experience with retrieval infrastructure such as Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, vector search, or feature stores.

Benefits and Culture: Raya offers comprehensive medical and dental coverage, a $50 a day food delivery budget, equity based employment, and a supportive culture. We also provide learning opportunities, unlimited vacation, and 12 weeks of paid parental leave. Additionally, all employees receive $1,000 annually to travel to a new location, driven by our values of human connection, empathy, and curiosity.