Lyft is hiring a Senior ML Engineer Recommendations in Toronto!
Lyft is hiring a Senior Machine Learning Engineer for its Rider Applied AI team in Toronto, working on recommendation systems and AI-driven features for a ride-sharing platform that handles roughly a billion rides annually and operates at petabyte scale. The position blends architecture-level thinking with hands-on development: you will take state-of-the-art research, including work with large language models, and turn it into reliable production systems that serve real-time traffic. The role sits at the intersection of applied research and platform engineering, and comes with mentoring duties and cross-functional exposure to product, data science, and backend engineering groups. Lyft describes the team environment as collaborative and creative, with an expectation that engineers can independently frame ambiguous business problems and resolve them with data-driven approaches. Compensation is listed at a base range of $149,600 to $187,000 CAD, with equity, bonus, and benefits potentially on top. The schedule is hybrid, requiring three days per week on-site in Toronto, including Mondays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays.
Key responsibilities
- Build and ship machine learning models for real-time use cases, moving research prototypes into production
- Design scalable and dependable ML pipeline architectures that fit cleanly into existing backend services
- Track emerging algorithms and frameworks, particularly LLMs and LLM-based applications, and judge which ones are worth pursuing
- Assess new research critically and map promising techniques onto high-impact business problems across the company
- Work alongside ML engineers, product managers, data scientists, and software engineers to keep ML work aligned with business priorities
- Use data and experimentation to guide and refine ML strategy
- Offer technical direction and mentor junior engineers, encouraging a culture of learning
- Write production-quality code and review teammates' work to maintain standards and spread knowledge
Key requirements
- M.S. or Ph.D. in computer science or a closely related technical discipline
- 5+ years of ML modelling experience, or 3+ years for candidates holding a Ph.D.
- Deep learning experience for recommendation systems using TensorFlow, PyTorch, or comparable frameworks
- Grasp of statistical fundamentals including hypothesis testing, regression, and ML evaluation metrics
- Demonstrated record of converting state-of-the-art ML research into working production systems
- Proficiency in Python, Golang, or another programming language
- Comfort operating on ambiguous problems and delivering at scale
- Strong communication and collaboration skills for cross-functional work
- Seniority: Senior
- Work mode: Hybrid — at least 3 days per week in the Toronto office (Mondays, Wednesdays, Thursdays), with up to 4 weeks per year remote from anywhere
- Salary: $149,600 - $187,000 CAD base, excluding equity, bonus, and benefits
- Key skills: Python, Golang, PyTorch, TensorFlow, Deep learning, Recommendation systems, LLMs, ML pipelines, System design, Statistics, Mentorship, Cross-functional collaboration
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