Staff Machine Learning Engineer

Estee Lauder is looking for a Staff Machine Learning Engineer to help design, build, test, and deploy production AI products and the platform that powers them. This player-coach role focuses on engineering rigor for stateful and transactional systems, with agentic and LLM-powered capabilities delivered on Google Cloud.

Working onsite in New York, NY, you will partner across engineering, product, and domain experts to build automation, measurement, and modeling workflows, while mentoring engineers and scientists.

What you’ll do

• Design, build, test, and deploy production agentic / LLM-powered products end-to-end on Google Cloud, including shared platform components, tooling, and harnesses.
• Bring software-engineering rigor to services that include stateful and transactional (OLTP) systems, covering data modeling, concurrency, idempotency, reliability, observability, and testing.
• Use classical ML, statistics, and experimentation when needed, including predictive modeling, statistical inference, hypothesis testing, and causal or incrementality measurement.
• Build scalable tools that enable automation across areas such as recommendation and personalization, conversational and customer experiences, and measurement and incrementality.
• Author design documents, maintain standards for clean code and documentation, and review designs and deliverables from others.
• Mentor and grow engineers and scientists, including support for early-career and student mentorship efforts.
• Collaborate cross-functionally on major automation, measurement, and modeling initiatives.
• Participate in Estee Lauder’s diversity and inclusion agenda.

What you’ll bring

• BS/BA in a quantitative or technical field (for example: Computer Science, Statistics, Mathematics, Physics, Engineering, Operations Research, Economics) or equivalent practical experience; graduate degree a plus.
• 5+ years of experience (or 3+ with a graduate degree) across Software Engineering, Machine Learning, and/or Data Science.
• Strong software engineering in Python, including clean API and service design, data-structure and algorithm fundamentals, and disciplined testing; experience building and operating production-grade services with stateful or transactional systems and databases using SQL and/or NoSQL.
• Experience deploying and operating LLM-powered or agentic systems (examples include retrieval-augmented generation, agents and tool use, structured outputs, evaluation, and safety) or a strong production-ML background with interest in moving into this space.
• Experience deploying and operating systems on a major cloud platform (with Google Cloud a plus) and solid data-processing practices at scale.
• Ability to use agentic / AI-assisted development tools, with judgment on where they help while maintaining quality.
• A track record of mentorship, continuous learning, a bias for simplicity, and a collaborative shared-ownership style.

Technologies you may work with

• Python, Google Cloud
• SQL, NoSQL
• Retrieval-augmented generation, LLM-powered, agentic systems
• Vertex AI, Cloud Run, BigQuery, Firestore, Pub/Sub
• FastAPI
• Container-based CI/CD
• Model Context Protocol (MCP)

Benefits

• Health insurance coverage (medical, dental, and vision insurance)
• Wellness and family support programs
• Life and disability insurance
• Retirement savings plans
• Paid leave programs
• Education-related programs
• Paid holidays and vacation time
• Bonus program (highly competitive), with possibility for overachievement
• Participation in the share incentive plan

Preferred / strong plus

• Genuine depth in classical ML / data science / statistics, including statistical modeling, hypothesis testing and experimentation, causal inference and incrementality, and predictive modeling
• Hands-on experience in NLP, agent frameworks, or advanced statistical methods
• Familiarity with Google Cloud (Vertex AI, Cloud Run, BigQuery, Firestore, Pub/Sub), async Python (FastAPI), container-based CI/CD, and Model Context Protocol (MCP)
• Experience designing a technical roadmap and leading execution in a business environment

Pay range

• The anticipated base salary range is $119,300.00 to $196,600.00 per year.
• Exact salary depends on factors such as experience, skills, education, and budget.
• The salary range may vary based on geographic location.
• In addition to base salary, the role is eligible for a highly competitive bonus program and participation in the share incentive plan.