Principal ML Engineer/ ML Scientist

Role: Founding Principal ML Engineer/ ML Scientist

Location: Gurgaon

Function: Applied AI

Compensation: 50-100 LPA + ESOPs

About the Company:

A venture-backed, stealth-stage technology company building next-gen matchmaking and relationship platforms is hiring their founding AI/ML & Data Engineering Team.

They are on a mission to reimagine how people connect, using AI, community, and content as the building blocks. They’re not building just another dating app — they’re creating an experience where users feel: “This app gets me.”

At the core of the product are real-time, ML recommendation engines — similar to Spotify for song moods or TikTok for discovery.

They are well funded and backed by marquee VCs in India and US.

Company Philosophy:

Core belief:

• Great data + Good models = Great recommendations
• Good data + Great models = Average recommendations

That’s why they’re investing in data infrastructure from the inception and foundation.

Position Overview:

As the founding ML engineer, you’ll design and deploy the core recommendation and personalisation systems that power the matchmaking experience. You’ll own the full lifecycle - from design to deployment - while laying the foundation for scalable, real-time ranking infrastructure.

Role & Responsibilities:

• Own and develop match-making, recommendation, ranking and personalisation systems.
• Work on creating a novel, real-time adaptive matchmaking engine that learns from user interactions and other signals
• Design ranking and recommendation algorithms that make each user's feed feel curated for them
• Build user embedding systems, similarity models, and graph-based match scoring frameworks
• Explore and integrate cold-start solutions
• Partner with Data + Product + Backend teams to deliver great customer experiences
• Deploy models to production using fast iteration loops, model registries, and observability tooling
• Build the ML engineering team and culture

Ideal Profile:

You are a full-stack ML data scientist-engineer who can design, model, and deploy recommendation systems and ideally have led initiatives in recsys, feed ranking, or search

• 3–10 years of experience working on personalisation, recommendations, search, or ranking at scale
• Prior experience in a B2C product – social, ecommerce, fashion, dating, gaming, or video platforms
• Exposure to a wide range of popular recommendation and personalisation techniques, including collaborative filtering, deep retrieval models (e.g., two-tower), learning-to-rank, embeddings with ANN search, and LLM approaches for sparse data personalisation.
• Can train models AND ship them – experience with end-to-end ML pipelines
• Understands offline and online evaluation, A/B testing, and metric alignment
• Experience with vector search, graph-based algorithms and LLM-based approaches is a big plus

What the role offers:

• Join a founding team where your work is core to the product experience
• Shape the future of how humans connect in the AI era
• Significant ESOPs and wealth creation + competitive cash compensation