Senior Staff Applied ML Engineer - Consumer Agents

Location: Remote — North America

About the role

The Consumer Agent team builds Shopify's consumer-facing agentic shopping experiences — the AI agents inside the Shop app and on merchant storefronts that help millions of buyers search, discover, and buy. As a Senior Staff Applied Machine Learning Engineer, you'll be the person we point at the hardest problems on the surface — distillation to own-GPU inference, agentic memory, whole-page optimization, propensity modeling, or the evaluation rigor that ties them together — and trust to drive it to a shipped, measured outcome. This is a senior individual-contributor seat with deep autonomy: you'll own ambiguous, high-leverage problems end to end, raise the bar for evaluation across the team, and ship weekly on a fast-moving consumer surface.

You'll work at the intersection of LLM orchestration, model training and distillation, search and retrieval, and cost/latency engineering, partnering with frontier model labs and ML teams across Shopify.

• Build and improve student models through supervised fine-tuning and knowledge distillation, including the serving, generation-termination, and throughput-economics work that own-GPU inference demands.
• Design and raise the bar for ML evaluation across the team — judge design, offline and online metrics, and the judgment to know when a number is real.
• Develop agentic memory and personalization signals — buyer and user representations, profile generation — that feed predictive layers.
• Work on whole-page optimization: page composition, ranking, and blending for the agent results surface.
• Build propensity and predictive models for intent and purchase propensity across agent surfaces.
• Move fluidly between distillation, memory, ranking, propensity, and evaluation as priorities shift, without lengthy re-tooling.
• Apply rigorous experimentation on a high-traffic surface — proper holdouts, A/B rigor, and counterfactual or off-policy evaluation where online tests aren't enough.
• Integrate cleanly with an LLM orchestration stack already in flight — tool calling, structured output, and retrieval-augmented patterns.
• Become the technical reference point the team routes its hardest model and evaluation calls to.
• Contribute to cross-team ML architecture conversations across Shopify's ML organization and external model-lab partnerships.
• Ship weekly, absorbing ambiguity rather than adding coordination overhead.

Qualifications

• You've shipped LLM systems to production at real scale — systems with real users, not research prototypes.
• Hands-on depth in model training and distillation: supervised fine-tuning and knowledge distillation in practice.
• Comfort with the serving and throughput-economics side of inference, not just the training run.
• Rigorous evaluation methodology: judge design, offline and online metrics, and the judgment to distinguish a real result from an artifact.
• You operate as a senior individual contributor with high autonomy — you take an ambiguous, hard problem and drive it quickly to a measured outcome without hand-holding.
• Breadth over a single specialty: you can move across distillation, memory, whole-page optimization, propensity, and evaluation.
• Strong communication and collaboration in a fast-paced, cross-functional environment.
• Able to work with significant overlap with North America time zones.

Nice to have

• E-commerce, marketplace, commerce-search, recsys, or ads background — with instincts for selection bias, position bias, and the gap between offline and online metrics.
• Inference and serving internals: vLLM or similar engines, structured and constrained decoding, KV-cache and GPU throughput economics, and latency budgets.
• Reinforcement learning experience — RLHF, RLAIF, or preference optimization.
• Propensity, ranking, or classical applied ML at scale: gradient boosting, neural ranking, calibration, position-bias correction.
• Counterfactual evaluation experience — inverse propensity scoring, doubly-robust estimators, off-policy evaluation.
• Experience working alongside or with frontier AI products and agentic systems.
• Shopifyhttps://www.shopify.com
• About the discipline

Engineering. It’s our DNA.

• Engineering isn't a department at Shopify.
• It's our DNA.
• The engineers who thrive here care about the code, the system, and the merchants relying on both.
• They want hard problems and uncomfortable growth.
• They find solutions without waiting for permission.
• They ship weekly.
• They want commerce to work better for everyone.
• So does our founder, Tobi, who still codes and still shapes where this thing is going.
• They're open source nerds.
• They pair program because two brains write better code than one.
• New tools, new models, new approaches.
• They experiment constantly.
• Most of what's standard here started as someone hacking on something.
• They use AI like a keyboard, reflexively and everywhere, to clear the mundane and make room for thinking.
• And they work in the open.
• The fastest way to learn here is to watch someone better than you do the work.
• If that sounds like you, come build with us.

Infrastructure engineering

• Infrastructure Engineers at Shopify build and maintain the systems that handle millions of requests per second and billions of dollars in transactions.
• At that scale, performance gains matter and weak assumptions surface quickly.
• Your systems power the experience for millions of entrepreneurs and buyers every minute of every day, including peak events like Black Friday.
• Engineers at Shopify spend the majority of their time actually writing code to build and improve infrastructure.
• You’ll solve problems that don’t exist anywhere else, with challenges that push what’s possible.
• If that lights you up, come build with us.
• Growth and rewards

Mastery-matched compensation.

~Mastery

• At Shopify, getting better at your craft and increasing your impact is how you grow.
• Twice a year, we assess both in our ~Mastery cycle, Shopify’s performance review.
• Achieving higher ~Mastery is a promotion, and when you earn a promotion your total rewards grow with it.
• Crafter and manager are equal paths, so you can pursue excellence in the craft you’re best at.

Total Rewards

• With Flex Comp, your Rewards Wallet gives you agency over your compensation mix.
• Adjust your mix of cash, restricted share units, and stock options (including programs like Long-Term Equity)* to where it makes sense for you, and mix it up anytime as life and priorities change.
• Buying a house?
• Want more skin in the game?
• Just experimenting?
• It’s your call.
• * Flex Comp program offerings vary based on location, role, and employment type.
• Full details are set out in our Terms & Conditions and related plan documents.
• Built for real life

Room for the rest of your life.

Flexible work, remote by design

• A flexible vacation policy means most Shopifolk can take the vacation days they feel they need to recharge.
• If a change of everyday scenery is more your jam, Destination 90 means you can work from (almost) anywhere in the world for 90 days of the year.

Your setup

• Your battlestation is your home base.
• Request the desk, chair, and AV gear you need to get shit done.
• You need ‘em, we’ve got ‘em.
• Our health and welfare benefits may include health, dental, vision, disability, and life insurance depending on your country.
• If you’re in a country without a package, you'll receive a monthly allowance.
• We also offer mental health support for you and your dependents, including immediate and confidential services like counseling and coaching sessions.

Family support

• We offer fertility benefits globally, along with paid parental leave to welcome a new family member.
• Applying to work here

Show us your craft.

• Read the candidate guide
• The Life Story is how we understand the themes of your career journey so far, human to human.
• What you’ve learned, and how you made a difference.
• Show us the trophies and the bruises: the problems you’ve solved, the challenges you encountered, the decisions you made, and the lessons you learned along the way.
• We’re looking for world-class crafters.
• Crafters obsessed with pursuing excellence in their field.
• Our craft assessment looks at your personal journey toward mastery, and your potential to go broader and deeper in novel ways.
• You’ll start with an online assessment, followed by a craft assessment.
• Show us what you do best, and how you do it.
• Shopify’s bar is high, and code wins arguments around here.
• Let your skills do the talking.
• Building on your craft assessment, these interviews dive deeper into your experience and technical aptitude.
• Depending on the role, this may include technical deep dives focusing on projects you've previously worked on, collaborating in a design critique, exploring a dataset using SQL, or taking the lead on solving a problem with your interviewer as your co-pilot.
• Pssst.
• Extraordinary technical work speaks for itself.Skip the resume.
• Show us what you’ve built instead.
• Take the /alt path