Machine Learning Engineer, Search and Ranking Systems

Farfetch is a leading global marketplace for the luxury fashion industry. The Farfetch Marketplace connects customers in over 190 countries and territories with items from more than 50 countries and over 1,400 of the world’s best brands, boutiques, and department stores, delivering a truly unique shopping experience and access to the most extensive selection of luxury on a global marketplace.

PORTO
Our office is near Porto, in the north of Portugal, and is located in a vibrant business hub. It offers a dynamic and welcoming environment where our employees can connect and network with a large community of tech professionals.

TECHNOLOGY
We're on a mission to build end-to-end products and technology that powers the an incredible e-commerce experience for luxury customers everywhere, understanding the motivations and needs of our customers and partners, to designing and testing hypotheses, to creating industry-leading experiences for luxury customers.

THE ROLE
We're looking for a highly skilled Machine Learning Engineer to join our Search and Ranking team, a core function at the heart of our e-commerce platform. Our mission is to connect customers with the perfect products by delivering a fast, relevant, and personalized search experience. You will be at the forefront of this effort, tackling the unique challenges of search in the luxury fashion space, from understanding nuanced queries to ranking thousands of products accurately.
You'll be instrumental in designing, building, and scaling our next generation of search and ranking systems, leveraging a powerful tech stack that includes advanced retrieval models and multimodal models.
You will work within a dynamic, interdisciplinary team of software engineers, data scientists, and machine learning engineers to productionize cutting-edge research and directly influence the technical direction of our platform. If you are passionate about building robust, scalable AI systems that solve complex, real-world problems, this role is for you.

WHAT YOU'LL DO:
• Design, build, and deploy robust, end-to-end MLOps pipelines on Databricks for complex models, including NLP and multimodal systems.
• Architect and manage large-scale data flows using PySpark, pulling from diverse sources like Azure Data Lake Storage (ADLS) and Google BigQuery to fuel our model training and inference services.
• Develop and maintain scalable APIs and services that can handle millions of requests daily to serve model predictions, ensuring high availability and low latency.
• Champion engineering best practices by writing clean, tested, and maintainable code, and developing reusable libraries and frameworks that accelerate the team's delivery.
• Implement comprehensive monitoring and alerting for model performance and data drift to ensure our systems remain accurate and reliable over time.

WHO YOU ARE:
• A skilled software engineer with a passion for machine learning. You have proven experience building and deploying end-to-end ML-powered products in a production environment.
• Proficient in Python and modern software engineering practices, including version control (Git), CI/CD, dependency management, and automated testing.
• Experienced with distributed data processing. You have hands-on experience writing and optimizing complex data pipelines using Spark/PySpark.
• Comfortable in a cloud-native environment. You have practical experience with a major cloud platform (Azure, GCP, or AWS) and its data services.
• An excellent collaborator and communicator, able to work effectively in a cross-functional team of technical and non-technical members.

• Nice to have:
• Deep expertise with the Databricks platform, including Delta Lake, MLflow, and model serving.
• Experience with containerization technologies like Docker and orchestration with Kubernetes.
• Experience with Redis, particularly in high-throughput caching or as a low-latency feature store.
• Experience with Apache Airflow or similar workflow orchestration tools for managing complex data and machine learning pipelines.
• Experience with monitoring and logging frameworks (Grafana, Prometheus).

REWARDS & BENEFITS:
• Health insurance for the whole family, flexible working environment and well-being support and tools
• Extra days off, sabbatical program and days for you to give back for the community
• Training opportunities and free access to Udemy
• Flexible benefits program

EQUAL OPPORTUNITIES STATEMENT:
• Farfetch is an equal opportunities employer ensuring that all applicants are treated equally and fairly throughout our recruitment process. We are determined that no applicant experiences discrimination on the basis of sex, race, ethnicity, religion or belief, disability, age, gender identity, ancestry, sexual orientation, veteran status, marriage and civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, or any other basis prohibited by applicable law.

SCAM DISCLAIMER:
• It has come to our attention that there may be fraudulent activities involving individuals or organizations falsely claiming to represent Farfetch in order to attract candidates to a SCAM. Please be aware that Farfetch does not conduct recruitment processes through messaging apps or any unofficial communication channels, other than our official careers website. Additionally, Farfetch will never ask candidates for any form of payment during the recruitment process.