ML Engineer

About The Company
Patreon is a leading media and community platform dedicated to empowering creators to monetize their work and connect with their most passionate fans. With a mission to fund the creative class, Patreon has established itself as a pioneer in the creator economy, generating over $8 billion in revenue since inception. The platform facilitates diverse engagement options such as paid memberships, free memberships, community chats, live experiences, and direct sales, enabling creators to build sustainable businesses around their passion. Serving more than 300,000 creators and 60 million fans, Patreon continues to innovate in providing meaningful ways for creators to thrive. The platform’s success is reflected in its ability to generate over 10 million paying fans monthly, supporting a vibrant ecosystem where creators can share their work and grow their communities.
About The Role
Patreon is seeking a highly skilled Staff Machine Learning Engineer to join the Relevance team. In this role, you will be instrumental in developing and deploying sophisticated content and creator classification systems that enhance discovery, recommendation, and platform insights. Your work will directly impact how creators and fans connect, ensuring that users are presented with relevant content tailored to their interests. Based in San Francisco or New York, this hybrid role requires in-office presence two days per week to foster collaboration and innovation. As a key member of the team, you will collaborate with cross-functional partners including product managers, engineers, designers, legal, and trust & safety teams to design, implement, and optimize machine learning solutions that serve the platform’s diverse needs.
Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience in machine learning engineering or applied ML roles
• Proficiency in natural language processing, topic modeling, and clustering techniques
• Experience working within end-to-end machine learning pipelines, from data analysis to model deployment and monitoring
• Hands-on experience with unstructured content such as audio, video, text, and images, and extracting meaningful insights from complex media
• Strong coding skills in Python with fluency in common ML/NLP libraries
• Experience with distributed systems, production pipelines, and model deployment frameworks
• Excellent collaboration skills across engineering, data science, and product teams
• Clear communication skills with the ability to document technical work effectively
• Bachelor's or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Statistics, or a related field

Responsibilities

• Build and deploy machine learning pipelines that generate taxonomies of creators, content, and risk profiles across the platform
• Conduct exploratory data analyses and develop proof-of-concept models to identify opportunities and evaluate potential impact
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams including product, engineering, design, legal, and trust & safety to design effective ML solutions
• Analyze and prepare training data, utilizing crowdsourcing and data labeling techniques as needed
• Train, optimize, and iterate on machine learning models using innovative techniques
• Deploy models into production environments, writing backend code to support deployment processes
• Monitor model performance, troubleshoot issues, and iterate to improve accuracy and efficiency
• Translate complex data insights into actionable recommendations for stakeholders
• Communicate technical concepts clearly to non-technical audiences, including leadership
• Serve as a cultural and technical leader within the Relevance team, fostering innovation and best practices

Benefits

• Competitive salary and equity plans
• Comprehensive healthcare coverage
• Flexible time off and paid holidays
• Recharge days to promote well-being
• Commuter benefits and lifestyle stipends
• Learning and development stipends to support continuous growth
• Parental leave policies
• 401(k) plan with matching contributions

Equal Opportunity
Patreon is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to creating an inclusive environment where all employees and applicants are treated with respect and fairness, regardless of age, race, color, ancestry, national origin, religion, disability, sex, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, veteran status, or any other protected class. We encourage candidates from diverse backgrounds to apply.