Principal Machine Learning Engineer

We are looking for a Principal Machine Learning Engineer to set the technical direction for personalization and discovery across our global streaming platforms. Your mission is to define the long-term architecture and modeling strategy. This strategy will help millions of viewers find films, series, live sports, and news.

It will include Paramount+, Pluto TV, and future streaming products. You will focus on recommendations, ranking, retrieval, and real-time user awareness.

This is a Principal role, meaning you are a senior-most technical authority in the org. You set multi-quarter technical strategy, drive cross-team alignment, and are accountable for the scientific rigor of how we model long-term user satisfaction. You will work in a GCP-based environment.

You will use TensorFlow and PyTorch. The focus will be on modern personalization techniques. These techniques include representation learning.

They also include multi-modal embeddings, contextual bandits, and session modeling.

Setting the Architecture: You define the multi-stage personalization architecture. This includes retrieval, ranking, re-ranking, and exploration. Your work decides what content each user sees.

It also influences how users interact, discover new content, and stay involved over time.

Beyond the Click: You establish how we frame and optimize reward signals, ensuring personalization drives durable retention rather than short-term interaction traps.

Org-Level Quality Bar: You raise the technical bar across the Applied ML organization, anticipate systemic risks (data, modeling, feedback loops), and influence the broader personalization roadmap .

Set Technical Strategy: Own the multi-quarter technical roadmap for personalization, covering candidate generation, ranking, and exploration.

Architect end-to-end systems. Design multi-stage personalization systems. These systems include retrieval, deep ranking, contextual embeddings, and bandit-based exploration.

You will manage the entire process, from feature engineering to training, serving, and monitoring.

Advance modeling in production. Drive advanced techniques. Use representation learning, multi-task learning, multi-modal embeddings, and session modeling.

These strategies will help improve user satisfaction.

Cross-Pod Influence: Partner with Core Science, Content Understanding, ML Platform, and Product to align personalization with broader strategy.

Operate at Scale: Ensure personalization pipelines are high-throughput, reliable, and observable in GCP using TensorFlow/PyTorch and big-data tooling (Beam, BigQuery).

Raise the quality of experimentation. Establish practices that ensure high integrity in experiments. Improve the correlation between offline and online results.

Guide feature rollouts with solid scientific methods.

Mentorship & Talent: Mentor engineers, set technical standards across the org, and grow the next generation of senior ML talent.

Mitigate Systemic Risk: Identify and address feedback loops, exposure biases, and filter-bubble dynamics in how content is surfaced.

8+ years of experience in MLE, applied science, or large-scale recommender/ranking systems, with a track record of setting technical direction.

Proficient in representation learning. Experience with multi-modal embeddings. Knowledge of contextual bandits and session modeling.

Robust fluency in experimentation methodology, A/B testing, causal reasoning, and metric design.

Demonstrated ability to influence technical strategy across multiple teams.

Experience in high-traffic, real-time streaming or consumer apps.

Published work or recognized contributions in ranking, recommender systems, or applied ML.

Paramount Streaming, a division within Paramount Global, is the home to the company's direct-to-consumer services spanning free and paid in the form of Pluto TV and Paramount+. Pluto TV is the global leader in free ad-supported TV, delivering more than 1,400 global channels and an extensive library of streaming content, including live and original channels.

Paramount+, digital subscription video-on-demand and live streaming service, combines live sports, breaking news, and A Mountain of Entertainment. Paramount+ features an expansive library of original series, hit shows and popular movies across every genre from world-renowned brands and production studios, including SHOWTIME.

The hiring salary range for this position applies to New York, California, Colorado, Washington state, and most other geographies. Starting pay for the successful applicant depends on a variety of job-related factors, including but not limited to geographic location, market demands, experience, training, and education. The benefits available for this position include medical, dental, vision, 401(k) plan, life insurance coverage, disability benefits, tuition assistance program and PTO or, if applicable, as otherwise dictated by the appropriate Collective Bargaining Agreement.

This position is bonus eligible.