ML Team Lead at Yandex Games

Yandex Games is an international platform with over 40 million users each month. For ML development, this is important because such an audience allows us to conduct many parallel experiments and get results as quickly as possible. We are already among the top 3 global platforms with web games.

The recommendation system is the core of Yandex Games: the interface, scenarios, and business logic are built around it. The quality improvement of recommendations directly affects the key metrics of the service and business. Currently, it is a complex system with hundreds of features, several levels of selection, ranking, and business logic.

What tasks await you

Improving recommendation quality Your work will directly influence which games millions of users, who visit Yandex Games daily, will see. Improving recommendation quality is one of the key tasks of the service: you will need to build an experimentation strategy together with product and analytics, develop online and offline metrics, evaluate the impact of new ideas, and make decisions about which changes will become part of the product.

Team management and development You will build a strong team: participate in hiring, help developers grow, create clear goals for them, and maintain motivation. At the same time, it's important to remain a "player-coach": participate in developing key parts of the system, conduct reviews, analyze complex technical tasks, and be a technical guide for the team.

Developing the architecture of the recommendation system More than one machine learning algorithm is involved in recommendations—it's a large runtime system with several levels of selection, ranking, and business logic. You will design and develop components of this system, identify bottlenecks, propose and implement architectural improvements, and evaluate the impact of changes on service quality and stability.

More about ML at Yandex — in the channel Yandex for ML

We expect you to

• Have worked with RecSys or information retrieval
• Have managed a development team and know how to evaluate and solve complex technical tasks
• Be proficient in Python and C++ at a level sufficient to implement and optimize your ideas in production

It will be a plus

• Have worked on projects in a similar area
• Have deep knowledge in the field of modern DL