Staff Engineer - Recommendations

VRChat is a pioneering platform offering a unique social VR experience, and they are seeking a Staff Engineer to enhance their recommendations systems. The role focuses on developing data-driven features to improve user connections and content discovery, utilizing various technologies such as AWS, Python, and big data tools.

Responsibilities:

• Work within a full-stack team of engineers to develop, maintain, and optimize scalable data pipelines, backend services, and APIs for data-driven features like recommendations, content discovery, groups, and events in VRChat
• Design and implement data models and schemas that support both analytical needs and real-time recommendation systems
• Collaborate with data scientists, product managers, and other engineers to ensure the correct data is captured, processed, and available to power meaningful user experiences
• Implement and maintain data processing jobs using big data technologies (e.g., Spark, Kafka) to handle large-scale datasets
• Contribute to the evolution of our technical and product capabilities, helping to progress from simple heuristics to more sophisticated, data-backed personalization for content and experiences
• Participate in the design and implementation of backend systems including REST and websocket APIs, caching systems, queueing systems, and cloud orchestration
• Be available to occasionally jump into action to solve an outage

Requirements:

• 3+ years of experience in software engineering, with a strong focus on data engineering and building scalable backend systems for SaaS products or online platforms
• Proven experience building and optimizing production-grade data pipelines (ETL/ELT)
• Strong proficiency in SQL and experience with database optimization for both analytical queries and high-throughput real-time access
• Experience with big data technologies such as Spark, Hadoop/Beam, or Kafka
• Experience with cloud providers at scale, such as AWS or Google Cloud
• Able to work in a variety of languages and technologies, such as Python, JavaScript/Node.js, Mongo, and Redis
• Experience with Elasticsearch, data warehousing, and machine learning (ML) systems
• An agile, collaborative mindset and excellent communication skills, capable of working effectively in a remote, cross-functional team environment
• Experience building and scaling aspects of content discovery or recommendation systems
• Demonstrated interest in online communities, VR, or VRChat (as a user or creator). Knowing how our platform and community works will be helpful for this role
• Experience with social networks, social graphs, or systems dealing with user-generated content
• Experience working on consumer products, e-commerce, or two-sided marketplaces