Senior Applied Machine Learning Scientist

Join the future of news

We’re on a mission to deliver riveting storytelling for all of America. At The Washington Post, you’ll help reinvent news. Our work is driven by a deep investigative spirit and enhanced by innovation to bring audiences closer to the stories that matter most.

About Our Team

The Washington Post is powered by the passion and talent of our people. It takes all of us to reinvent news. Beyond our award-winning Newsroom and Opinions teams, we work across many departments, including Brand & Events, Communications, Customer Care, Engineering & Product, Finance, Human Resources, Legal, Marketing & Advertising, Print Operations, and Sales.

Why This Role Matters

The Washington Post is looking for a Senior Applied Machine Learning Scientist to lead the development of advanced AI/ML systems that power the next generation of journalism. This role will focus on Ask The Post, AI-powered search, retrieval, ranking, content understanding, and generative AI-powered reader experiences.

You will work at the intersection of generative AI, information retrieval, NLP, ranking, recommender systems, and experimentation to build intelligent systems that serve The Post’s journalism, readers, and business goals.

What Motivates You

• You value world-class journalism and want to build technology that strengthens that mission.

• You enjoy solving ambiguous, high-impact problems with practical AI/ML solutions.

• You are excited by advances in generative AI, search, retrieval, ranking, and recommendation.

• You communicate clearly, collaborate well, and thrive in a feedback-driven environment.

• You are eager to learn, share, and apply the latest AI/ML techniques.

How You'll Support the Mission

• Lead applied research and development for AI/ML systems across generative AI, search, retrieval, ranking, content understanding, and recommendation.

• Formulate ambiguous product and business challenges as scientific problems with clear metrics, experiments, and success criteria.

• Design, train, evaluate, and deploy advanced AI/ML models, including fine-tuned mid-range LLMs, dense and sparse embedding systems, VLMs, learning-to-rank models, agentic workflows, and efficient model-serving approaches for conversational search systems.

• Build and improve AI-powered experiences such as Ask The Post, semantic search, content understanding, question answering, ranking, and intelligent discovery.

• Design rigorous offline and online evaluations, including relevance evaluation, ranking metrics, retrieval quality, A/B testing, and causal analysis.

• Develop scalable and efficient production ML systems with attention to latency, reliability, cost, monitoring, and maintainability.

• Analyze large-scale behavioral, content, search, and interaction data to guide model and product improvements.

• Collaborate with scientists, engineers, data teams, product managers, editors, and other business stakeholders to deliver impactful AI/ML solutions.

• Provide technical leadership by shaping roadmaps, mentoring junior scientists and engineers, and promoting scientific rigor.

• Communicate technical approaches, tradeoffs, results, and business impact to technical and non-technical audiences.

The Skills and Experience You Bring

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Mathematics, Statistics, Machine Learning, or a related technical field.

• 4+ years of experience in applied machine learning, AI, data science, information retrieval, NLP, recommender systems, or a related field.

• Strong experience with Python and at least one ML framework such as PyTorch, TensorFlow, or JAX.

• Experience designing, evaluating, and deploying ML models using large-scale datasets.

• Strong foundation in machine learning, statistical analysis, experimental design, and model evaluation.

• Experience with search, ranking, retrieval, NLP, GenAI, or recommendation systems.

Preferred Qualifications

• Master’s or Ph.D. in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Statistics, Mathematics, Information Retrieval, NLP, or a related field.

• Deep familiarity with modern ML architectures, including transformer-based models, embedding models, two-tower architectures, LLMs, VLMs, and their applications in large-scale search, retrieval, ranking, and recommender systems.

• Hands-on experience building production systems for semantic search, retrieval-augmented generation, question answering, ranking, content understanding, recommendation, or GenAI-powered products.

• Experience with AWS, GCP, Spark, Beam, BigQuery, or similar cloud and big-data technologies.

• Experience with LLM/VLM evaluation, model calibration, uncertainty estimation, interpretability, responsible AI, or production model optimization.

• Experience with deep learning, reinforcement learning, multi-armed bandits, causal inference, or learning-to-rank methods.

• Publications, patents, open-source contributions, or technical talks in AI/ML, NLP, information retrieval, recommender systems, GenAI, or related areas.

• Experience mentoring scientists or engineers and influencing technical roadmaps.

Collaboration makes us stronger. That’s why our offices are designed with open layouts, modern technology, and easy access to transportation. With certain exceptions for newsgathering and business travel, we work on-site five days a week.

Compensation and Benefits

Wherever you are in your life or career, The Washington Post offers comprehensive and inclusive benefits for every step of your journey:

• Competitive medical, dental and vision coverage

• Company-paid pension and 401(k) match

• Three weeks of vacation and up to three weeks of paid sick leave

• Nine paid holidays and two personal days

• 20 weeks paid parental leave for any new parent

• Robust mental health resources

• Backup care and caregiver concierge services

• Gender affirming services

• Pet insurance

• Free Post digital subscription

• Leadership and career development programs

Benefits may vary based on the job, full-time or part-time schedule, location, and collectively bargained status.

The salary range for this position is:

The actual salary within this range will depend on individual skills, experience, and qualifications as they relate to specific job requirements. This position may be eligible for a bonus or incentive program, and a member of the Talent Acquisition team will discuss bonus payment terms and conditions during the interview process.