Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Ranking

Company Description

Depop is the community-powered circular fashion marketplace where anyone can buy, sell and discover desirable secondhand fashion. With a community of over 35 million users, Depop is on a mission to make fashion circular, redefining fashion consumption. Founded in 2011, the company is headquartered in London, with offices in New York and Manchester, and in 2021 became a wholly-owned subsidiary of Etsy. Find out more at www.depop.com

Our mission is to make fashion circular and to create an inclusive environment where everyone is welcome, no matter who they are or where they’re from. Just as our platform connects people globally, we believe our workplace should reflect the diversity of the communities we serve. We thrive on the power of different perspectives and experiences, knowing they drive innovation and bring us closer to our users. We’re proud to be an equal opportunity employer, providing employment opportunities without regard to age, ethnicity, religion or belief, gender identity, sex, sexual orientation, disability, pregnancy or maternity, marriage and civil partnership, or any other protected status. We’re continuously evolving our recruitment processes to ensure fairness and are open to accommodating any needs you might have.

If, due to a disability, you need adjustments to complete the application, please let us know by sending an email with your name, the role to which you would like to apply, and the type of support you need to complete the application to adjustments@depop.com.

For any other non-disability related questions, please reach out to our Talent Partners.

Role

Depop is looking for a Machine Learning Engineer to join the Ranking team in the UK. You will work alongside ML Scientists, Backend Engineers, MLOps, and other ML Engineers to build, deploy, maintain, and monitor the machine learning systems that power personalised ranking across key surfaces of the Depop app, including search results and recommendations.

The Ranking team develops learning-to-rank models that personalise the ordering of items for millions of users every day. These models are deployed for real-time inference and integrated across multiple services in the Depop platform.

As a Senior ML Engineer in this team, you will play a key role in building the infrastructure and systems required to train, deploy, and operate scalable ranking models in production.

Responsibilities

You will:

• Design and implement pipelines for training, evaluating, deploying, and monitoring learning-to-rank models.
• Work closely with ML Scientists to productionise ranking models, improving reliability, latency, and observability.

Build and optimise real-time model serving systems that deliver personalised rankings across the app.

Partner with backend and product teams to define integration requirements and coordinate deployment of ranking services.

Help extend the ML infrastructure for ranking systems in collaboration with the MLOps team, including:

• Reproducible model training workflows
• CI/CD pipelines for model deployment
• Real-time and batch model serving
• Online/offline feature consistency through the feature store
• Monitoring and alerting for production models
• Maintain high standards for operational excellence, including testing, monitoring, maintenance, and incident response.
• Contribute to a strong engineering culture focused on scalability, experimentation, and measurable impact.
  
  

Required Skills And Experience

• Proven experience building and deploying machine learning pipelines in production environments.
• Experience working with ranking, recommendation, or retrieval systems.
• Strong understanding of machine learning workflows, from experimentation to production deployment.