Machine Learning Engineer

One promise of Perch is to analyze all of the writing on the Internet and show you the best thing you can possibly read every time you open the app. As a machine learning engineer, you will be responsible for helping us deliver on this promise. Here are just a few of the ML-related engineering problems we need to solve:

1. Clean and organize our reading data. We are collecting tremendously useful data to gauge article quality and relevance that will help us better serve our users. For example, we know for any given article how many people opened it, finished it, bookmarked it, shared it, etc.
2. Gather other useful data. The most significant AI breakthroughs typically come from identifying or creating new sources of data, not inventing new algorithms. Google's page rank is a good example - the key insight wasn't algorithmic work, it was identifying backlinks as an incredibly valuable data source. Backlinks could be quity useful for Perch too (e.g. if your favorite writer frequently links to another blog, you'll probably like that blog too). What else? Article shares and comments on social media, PageRank scores, LLM quality scores for every article, are just a few ideas that come to mind.
3. Build an article recommendation and search engine. We basically have to solve a lot of the same machine learning problems Google, Meta, Spotify, and TikTok are working on.

This is an opportunity to do the best work of your life and build a product that impacts billions of people, while making the whole world smarter. Financially, you can view it as compressing 40+ working years into 2-4 really intense ones. Here are the assumptions that have to hold for Perch to be a $100 billion company, using Spotify's $100+ billion market cap and 640 MAUs as a comp:

1. 640 million MAUs: Hundreds of millions of people already read blogs and newsletters, and we think we can grow the market to 1 billion+ by removing discovery/cost friction from the user experience.
2. $30 ARPU: Spotify's revenue per user is $30. Instagram's is $50.

But beyond monetary rewards and potentially impacting the lives of billions of people, we believe this is a rare opportunity to grow as an engineer and as a person. You will work with a fantastic group of teammates on some incredibly hard problems, and in the process, you will become a better engineer than you ever could've imagined while cultivating friendships with your colleagues that last a lifetime. If this resonates, we'd love to talk with you.