Staff Engineer - Recommendations

Responsibilities

• Develop, maintain, and optimize scalable data pipelines, backend services, and APIs for recommendation and content discovery features.
• Design and implement data models and schemas to support both analytical needs and real-time recommendation systems.
• Collaborate with data scientists and product managers to ensure data is captured and processed to power meaningful user experiences.
• Implement and maintain data processing jobs using big data technologies like Spark and Kafka to handle large-scale datasets.
• Contribute to the evolution of technical capabilities, moving from simple heuristics to sophisticated, data-backed personalization.
• Participate in the design of backend systems including REST/websocket APIs, caching, queueing, and cloud orchestration.

Requirements

• 3+ years of software engineering experience with a focus on data engineering and scalable backend systems.
• Proven experience building and optimizing production-grade ETL/ELT pipelines.
• Strong proficiency in SQL and database optimization for analytical and high-throughput real-time access.
• Experience with big data technologies such as Spark, Hadoop/Beam, or Kafka.
• Experience with cloud providers at scale, specifically AWS or GCP.
• Proficiency in Python, JavaScript/Node.js, Mongo, and Redis.
• Experience with Elasticsearch, data warehousing, and machine learning (ML) systems.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience building and scaling content discovery or recommendation systems.
• Demonstrated interest in online communities, VR, or the VRChat platform.
• Experience with social networks, social graphs, or user-generated content systems.
• Experience working on consumer products, e-commerce, or two-sided marketplaces.

Benefits

• 100% remote work environment with flexible working hours.
• Health Benefits.
• 401K (US) or Group RRSP (Canada).
• Stock Options.
• Generous paid holiday schedule and unlimited/flexible vacation time.
• Paid parental leave benefits.

About the Company

VRChat offers a first-of-its-kind, game-changing platform that provides an endless collection of social VR experiences and gives the power of creation to its robust community. With over 250,000 worlds and growing, VRChat’s vision is to allow users to bring their imaginations to life and help shape the metaverse anywhere in the world on any device.