Staff Machine Learning Engineer
Babylist
Staff Machine Learning Engineer
Babylist
Universal baby registry with affiliate revenue
What The Role Is
We're hiring a Staff MLE for the Discovery team to own recommendations and personalization across Babylist's consumer experience — the homepage feed, product recs, search, and the ML-powered systems that make registry building feel effortless.
Babylist was built on editorial recommendations: products chosen by people with deep baby gear expertise. That editorial foundation is a big part of why millions of families trust us. We're now building ML-powered personalization on top of it, using one of the richest first-party datasets in parenting.
We're early in this work, and we have a real mandate. A small Discovery team has initial retrieval and reranking models live on parts of the site and a steady cadence of A/B tests. We are looking for a Staff MLE who has seen personalization done well at scale and can set the technical direction for where we go next.
Registry building is the heart of the Babylist product. Every parent builds a list of dozens of products, from swaddle to stroller, with real stakes (a friend or family member is going to buy these things, and a baby is going to use them). As a universal registry, this registry also typically spans many retailers. This makes registry building on Babylist one of the most interesting personalization problems in consumer e-commerce: latent intent, life-stage progression, multi-stakeholder gift dynamics, deep declarative signal in millions of completed registries, cross-retailer datapoints, and a user who genuinely wants help.
If you want to join a mature ML org and tune models at the margins, this isn't the right role. If you've worked inside a strong recommendations team, learned what good looks like, and want to build from zero-to-one at a company earlier in the journey, read on.
You'll be the technical lead for personalization on the Discovery team, working alongside a PM, Engineering Manager, Senior MLE and fullstack software engineers. You set where our models go over the next year or two, sequence the bets that get there, and stay deep in building. A few examples of the problems you’ll get to shape:
In practice, you will:
You’ve shipped recommendation and/or personalization systems that reached real users at scale within a consumer product, and can point to the business impact of your work. You’ve done this within a team that did ML well — you know what good looks like, and are motivated to bring that to a company earlier in their ML journey.
You bring:
We post real numbers. For a Canada-based Staff Engineer, the starting base salary range is 299,300 to 372,600 CAD plus a target annual bonus of 20 percent of base. That's total target cash of roughly 359,160 to 447,120 CAD. On top of that you get meaningful equity and a 401(k) match. Where you start in that range depends on your experience, and your pay grows from there with performance and scope.
How We Build
AI is the default here. Engineers run agentic sessions for most of the work, and a lot of the interesting engineering now lives in the scaffolding that makes the agents good: the eval harnesses, the curated context, custom review skills and fast CI. Agents also triage incidents and handle a big share of support. A human always owns the outcome.
The architecture is intentionally simple: one Rails monolith, MySQL and few moving parts. That's deliberate. Simple infrastructure lets us move fast and lets AI reason about the whole system, so the hardest problems are the ones in front of customers.
The Stack
An engineer, expecting her first baby, couldn't find the registry she wanted. So she built it. That's how Babylist started, and it's still how we work: engineers solving problems for families. Becoming a parent is one of the biggest moments in a person's life. Millions reach it for the first time every year, making thousands of decisions and figuring it out as they go. That's who we build for, and we're a long way from done.
Ten million people give gifts through Babylist every year. We did more than $750M in revenue in 2025, up 45 percent over the year before, and we've been profitable for eight years while staying independent. So you can take on a hard, multi-year problem without watching over your shoulder for the next round or the next correction. And the team is small, around 65 engineers, so what you ship stays visible and your scope stays wide.
Remote-first across the US and Canada, and we have been for years. That's not changing. We trust you to own your time and your outcomes, and we get everyone in a room together twice a year. Teams are small, pods of three to five engineers, so nothing you ship disappears into a committee. You'll work shoulder to shoulder with product, design and data, and with the partners across the business who rely on what you ship. You'll also stay close to customers yourself: sitting in on user interviews, watching session recordings, riding along with support. Here that's part of the engineering job, on a regular basis.
Three rounds, usually two to three weeks start to finish.
If your timeline is tight, tell us and we'll move faster.
Babylist is a universal baby registry platform that lets expecting and new parents add products from any store, so items from Amazon, Target, Etsy, and more can be collected in one registry. It provides expert-vetted guides, an interactive checklist, and curated kits to help families plan what they need without guesswork. It earns revenue through affiliate commissions on purchases, sales of exclusive curated kits, and advertising partnerships, not by locking users to a single retailer. Its goal is to simplify shopping and planning for new parents by combining cross-store options with practical guidance and resources.
Explore more opportunities at Babylist