Meta

Machine learning engineer in product recognition

In short

Lead-level machine learning engineer role at Meta in London, focused on architecting and scaling the Product Recognition and Intelligence stack behind shoppable media across Facebook, Instagram, and Muse. The role owns ML infrastructure architecture, sets engineering standards across teams, drives cross-organizational technical strategy, and mentors engineers at scale. Requires 12+ years of experience building and operating large-scale ML systems in production, with deep expertise in distributed training, model serving, and cross-team technical influence. Office-based, full-time position.

About the Role
Meta is reimagining shopping on Facebook, Instagram, and Muse. The vision is to make every piece of media shoppable. Behind that vision is our Product Recognition and Intelligence stack. It is the tech that looks at any photo, video, and text, and knows exactly which products are in it and how they relate to other products. We are building it to work at Meta's scale. Over 3 billion distinct users every day. Billions of items power a multibillion-dollar ad business.
Responsibilities
•Identify and solve the most complex machine learning systems problems across the organization, including model training efficiency, large-scale inference optimisation, and cross-system ML pipeline reliability
•Define and own the technical architecture for critical ML infrastructure components, ensuring designs are extensible, maintainable, and capable of supporting the next generation of model development at Meta's scale
•Establish engineering standards and invariants for ML systems that prevent entire categories of reliability, correctness, and performance issues across multiple teams
•Drive cross-organizational technical strategy by assessing emerging ML technologies, evaluating trade-offs between competing approaches, and influencing roadmap decisions with leadership and cross-functional partners
•Lead the design and delivery of org-wide ML platform initiatives, coordinating across engineering teams, research, product, and data science to align on priorities and drive execution through ambiguity
•Develop new metrics and data-driven frameworks for evaluating ML system health, model quality, and infrastructure efficiency, and connecting them to organization-level goals
•Mentor and coach engineers across the organization on ML system design, debugging complex models and infrastructure failures, and developing scalable solutions to recurring technical challenges
•Collaborate with privacy, security, and compliance teams to design ML systems that uphold user safety, meet regulatory requirements, and set the standard for responsible AI practices within the business domain
•Identify and eliminate engineering bottlenecks through improved tooling, automation, and process improvements that make ML development faster and more reliable across the organization
•Contribute to recruiting efforts by building relationships with candidates who bring critical ML systems expertise, and serve as a technical reference point for evaluating engineering talent at the most senior levels
Requirements
•12+ years of experience designing, building, and operating large-scale machine learning systems in production environments
•Experience architecting ML infrastructure components such as distributed training pipelines, model serving systems, feature stores, or ML evaluation frameworks at a significant scale
•Experience in identifying and resolving systemic performance, reliability, or correctness issues that span multiple ML systems or abstraction layers
•Experience influencing technical direction across multiple engineering teams through written proposals, design reviews, and cross-functional stakeholder alignment
•Experience defining engineering standards, architectural patterns, or platform capabilities that have been adopted broadly across an organization
Nice to Have
•Experience in building large-scale object recognition models
•Experience collaborating with applied research teams to translate theoretical ML advances into production-grade system improvements
•Demonstrated ongoing AI skill development (e.g., prompt/context engineering, agent orchestration) and staying current with emerging AI technologies
•Demonstrated ability to integrate AI tools to optimize/redesign workflows and drive measurable impact (e.g., efficiency gains, quality improvements)
•Experience developing novel approaches to ML observability, experiment management, or model lifecycle tooling that improved engineering velocity across teams
•Experience leading multi-year ML platform or infrastructure migrations in complex, mature technical environments
•Experience in training large language models to production systems at scale
•Experience adhering to and implementing responsible, ethical AI practices (e.g., risk assessment, bias mitigation, quality and accuracy reviews)
Conditions
In addition to base compensation, Meta offers benefits.

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