Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Agentic Context Retrieval and Search (Nova)

About this role

Lead development of context retrieval and search for Iterable Nova, the AI layer of its customer engagement platform. Build retrieval systems and search agents that ground responses in customer data, understand query intent, and perform reliably in production.

About the company

Iterable is a cross-channel marketing platform for email, push, SMS, and in-app messaging. It helps growth and lifecycle teams orchestrate personalized customer journeys.

The team

Iterable Nova

Stack

What you'll do

• Build retrieval across structured and unstructured customer data.
• Develop query understanding, rewriting, decomposition, intent classification, and entity resolution.
• Build pipelines to extract and refresh entities, embeddings, summaries, and metadata.
• Create search agents for multi-hop retrieval, result sufficiency checks, and retrieval failure detection.
• Evaluate retrieval quality using ranking metrics, LLM judges, human labels, and online tests.
• Mentor engineers and help set Nova's technical direction.

What we're looking for

• 5+ years of hands-on machine learning engineering experience deploying complex models at scale.
• Master's or PhD in computer science, machine learning, AI, or a related field.
• Deep information retrieval expertise across lexical, dense, and hybrid retrieval, plus learning-to-rank.
• Production experience with search engines, relevance tuning, and reranking.
• Experience with RAG, query rewriting, grounding, and retrieval-based agents.
• Strong evaluation practices, including offline benchmarks, regression detection, A/B testing, and labeling pipelines.

Nice to have

• Experience with Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google LLM APIs, including tool calling and prompt caching.
• Experience indexing and ranking structured and unstructured data in one system.