Staff Machine Learning Engineer

Phantom is on a mission to connect the world to the freedom of open markets. Tens of millions of people all over the world use Phantom to access global markets that never close, including perpetuals, prediction markets, tokenized assets, stablecoins and memes. Phantom users are able to discover the markets that matter and the cultural moments that shape them, building conviction through real-time data and the verified performance of top traders. With self-custody and access to open networks at its core, Phantom lets them control their financial moves in the same app they use to safely store or spend money worldwide.

Phantom has reached #1 in Google Play's finance category and consistently ranks in the top 50 apps across all categories. Check out our Forbes Fintech 50 and CNBC and Statista's World's Top Fintech Companies 2026!

We are around 180 people, fully remote, backed by a $150M Series C investment from a16z, Sequoia Capital and Paradigm.

We are seeking a visionary and hands-on Staff Machine Learning Engineer to lead the technical strategy, architecture, and execution of our Growth and Engagement ML initiatives. In this role, you will bridge the gap between advanced machine learning and business strategy, designing systems that drive user acquisition, retention, lifetime value (LTV), and deep product engagement. As a technical pillar of the engineering organization, you will own the end-to-end lifecycle of complex ML models, mentor senior engineers, and collaborate closely with Product, Data Science, and Marketing leadership to move core business metrics.

Responsibilities Technical Leadership & Strategy

• Define the long-term technical roadmap for Growth and Engagement ML systems, ensuring scalability, reliability, and measurable business impact.

• Architect and deploy production-grade ML pipelines and real-time decisioning systems that power personalization, notification dispatch, and onboarding flows.

• Evaluate and integrate cutting-edge ML techniques, including multi-armed bandits, reinforcement learning, LLMs for content generation, and advanced graph neural networks.

Execution & Modeling

• Design, train, and validate sophisticated models targeting user lifecycle stages: propensity to churn, lifetime value (LTV) forecasting, next-best-action, and lookalike modeling.

• Build and optimize recommendation engines and semantic search systems to surface highly relevant content, products, or features to users.

• Establish robust experimentation frameworks (advanced A/B testing, causal inference, and multi-variate testing) to rigorously validate model variants in production.

Collaboration & Mentorship

• Partner with Product and Growth marketing teams to translate high-level business hypotheses into precise, actionable machine learning problems.

• Mentor and coach senior engineers across the data and ML organizations, fostering a culture of technical excellence and continuous learning.

• Advocate for ML engineering best practices, including model monitoring, feature store utilization, reproducible training pipelines, and data governance.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of professional experience in machine learning engineering, data science, or software engineering, with at least 3+ years in a Staff, Principal, or Tech Lead capacity.

• Proven track record of building and scaling ML systems specifically within growth, marketing tech, recommendation engines, or consumer engagement domains.

• Extensive experience with large-scale data processing and distributed computing.

Technical Proficiencies

• Languages: Expert-level Python, Scala, or Java.

• ML Frameworks: PyTorch, TensorFlow, JAX, or XGBoost.

• Data & MLOps Infrastructure: Spark, Flink, Kafka, Snowflake/BigQuery, Ray, Kubeflow, MLflow, or SageMaker.

• Experimentation: Deep understanding of causal inference, uplift modeling, and robust statistical testing methodologies.

Core Competencies

• Business Acumen: Ability to directly connect algorithmic improvements to top-line growth metrics (e.g., MAU/DAU, conversion rates, retention curves).

• Communication: Exceptional ability to explain highly complex technical architectures and algorithmic choices to non-technical stakeholders and executives.

Why Work With Us Phantom's journey to becoming a global trading app began with making crypto easier to use. Today, we’re building on that foundation to help people discover the markets that matter, make informed financial moves, and safely store or spend their money worldwide. Joining Phantom means helping shape that next chapter: building products that bring the freedom of open markets to more people.

• Build for global impact: Create products used by tens of millions of people, making innovative financial markets more accessible to users around the world.

• Make complexity feel simple: Solve meaningful challenges across design, engineering, and user experience to make discovering markets and managing money seamless.

• Put users in control: Help build a future where people have greater freedom over their assets and financial decisions, with security and self-custody at the foundation.

Benefits (only available to full-time employees)

• Competitive salary and equity

• Comprehensive insurance (medical/dental/vision): base plan 100% covered

• Flexible hours and a long-standing, supportive remote environment

• Unlimited vacation: Take time when you need it (and we really mean it!)

• 401(k) retirement plan

• Wellness stipend

• Weekly meal stipend

• Learning & Development stipend

• Remote / WFH set-up stipend

We strongly encourage candidates of all backgrounds to apply. We believe that our work is stronger with a variety of perspectives, and we’re eager to further diversify our company. If you have a background that you feel would make an impact at Phantom, please consider applying. We’re committed to building an inclusive, supportive place for you to do the best work of your career.

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