Senior Machine Learning Engineer

Los Angeles · USD 138,500-195,000 · 5+ years experience · Hybrid · Posted Oct 16, 2026

At a glance

Taboola empowers businesses to grow through performance advertising technology that goes beyond search and social and delivers measurable outcomes at scale.
Taboola works with thousands of businesses who advertise directly on Realize, Taboola’s powerful ad platform, reaching approximately 600M daily active users across some of the best publishers in the world. Publishers like NBC News, Yahoo, and OEMs such as Samsung, Xiaomi and others use Taboola’s technology to grow audience and revenue, enabling Realize to offer unique data, specialized algorithms, and unmatched scale.

As a Sr Machine Learning Engineer on Taboola’s R&D Team in Downtown Los Angeles, you will work on recommendation and ranking algorithms driving Taboola's performance advertising platform.
The models you build directly influence campaign performance and revenue outcomes for advertisers worldwide while serving 600M+ daily active users.

Design and build predictive customer behavior models for targeting and personalization.
Implement the applicable Machine Learning or statistics based algorithm for prediction and optimization and deliver the trained model to production.
Take end-to-end ownership: design, build, ship, measure, and maintain models and the services around them—rapidly prototyping and delivering complete projects/products using AI-assisted vibe coding workflows.
Act as a Harness Engineer: build the evaluation harnesses, automated testing frameworks, benchmarks, and guardrails that let the team experiment, measure model quality, and ship AI/ML systems safely and repeatedly, following a TDD process.
Present findings to the product team and technical team leads in a clear and actionable way.
Build and maintain code to populate HDFS, Hadoop with log from Kafka or data loaded from SQL production systems.
Design, build and support algorithms of data transformation, conversion, computation on Hadoop, Spark and other distributed Big Data Systems.

Bachelor or advanced degree in a relevant field, ideally Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or Computational Economics
5+ years of hands-on experience in Python and Java
Proficiency with ML frameworks (e.g., PyTorch, Tensorflow)
Experience with recommendation systems, ranking algorithms, or personalization at scale
Experience taking end-to-end ownership of ML systems: design, build, ship, measure, and maintain — using AI-assisted vibe coding tools (e.g., Cursor, Claude, GitHub Copilot)
Experience building automated evaluation harnesses and test frameworks for ML systems — defining benchmarks, baselines, and guardrails that let a team ship confidently and repeatedly
Ability to communicate technical findings clearly, and to collaborate effectively across teams (including early morning or evening syncs with our Tel Aviv team)

Experience with Karpathy's autoresearch (MIT), AutoML or any other agentic tools for ML experiments

Hybrid work schedule with 3 days in-office with an option to come in more often if desired