Staff Machine Learning Engineer

Position Overview

• Location Type: Remote
• Job Type: Full-Time
• Salary: Not specified

Madhive is a leading independent and fully customizable operating system designed to help local media professionals build profitable, differentiated, and efficient businesses. Madhive empowers sales teams to extend their reach into streaming and connects local advertisers with the communities they serve. The platform provides the unique ability to reach local audiences at national scale, with premium supply partnerships and end-to-end tools for planning, targeting, and measuring full-funnel campaign outcomes. Powering campaigns for over 30,000 small and medium businesses per day, Madhive is driving the evolution of local media.

This role is for a Staff Machine Learning Engineer within a tech-forward buy-side advertising platform. You will be embedded in a full-stack team revolutionizing how broadcasters and agencies serve local advertisers. Your work will shape the future of advertising technology by building ML systems that process billions of daily requests and pioneering human-facing AI ergonomics—creating natural, hyper-collaborative interactions between humans and intelligent systems.

The Challenge: Madhive is tackling complex ML problems at the intersection of advertising optimization and human-centered design, including:

• Campaign Intelligence: Building ML systems to optimize advertising campaigns in real-time, making billions of inferences daily across live transactions.
• Data Storytelling: Transforming massive-scale data streams into rich, actionable insights that empower local advertisers to compete effectively and connect novel insights with known audience facts.
• AI Ergonomics Pioneer: Creating intuitive ML interfaces where intelligence enhances rather than complicates workflows.
• Real-time Decision Systems: Designing models for split-second decisions on bidding, targeting, and optimization while maintaining transparency and control.

What You'll Do

Technical Leadership (80% IC work):

• Architect and implement production ML systems handling billions of daily requests with sub-second latency requirements.
• Design sophisticated optimization algorithms for bidding strategies, campaign performance, and audience targeting.
• Build both real-time inference pipelines and large-scale batch processing systems.
• Create evaluation frameworks that balance multiple objectives: performance, cost, user experience, and advertiser ROI.

AI Ergonomics Innovation:

• Pioneer natural AI interactions where machine learning seamlessly enhances user workflows.
• Develop collaborative AI systems that augment human decision-making without adding cognitive load.
• Design ML features that feel intuitive and require zero training to use effectively.

Technical Mentorship & Influence:

• Elevate ML engineering practices across the company through mentorship and knowledge sharing.
• Guide junior ML engineers on your team and throughout the organization.
• Collaborate with executive stakeholders to align ML strategy with business objectives.
• Partner with your full-stack team (frontend, backend, design, data) to deliver end-to-end solutions.

Core Requirements

• Experience: 8+ years building production systems with 4+ years focused on ML at scale.
• Education: Bachelor's in Computer Science, ML, or related field (Master's preferred, PhD welcome).
• Production ML: Proven track record deploying and maintaining ML systems serving billions of requests.
• Technical Depth:
  • Experience combining LLMs with classical ML models to solve problems more complex than RAG.
  • Expertise in modern ML frameworks (TensorFlow, PyTorch, JAX).
  • Experience with both real-time inference and batch processing at scale.
  • Strong foundation in distributed systems and cloud platforms (GCP preferred).
  • Ability to thrive across the ML infrastructure spectrum—from rapid prototyping to robust production systems.
• Leadership: Experience mentoring engineers and driving technical decisions in cross-functional teams.