Applied Machine Learning

Company Description

Opportunity is not evenly distributed. Shopify puts independence within reach for anyone with a dream to start a business. Since 2006, we’ve grown to over 10,000 employees and generated over $500 billion in sales for millions of merchants in 175 countries. Every 28 seconds, an entrepreneur on Shopify makes their first sale.

This is life-defining work that directly impacts people’s lives as much as it transforms your own. This is putting the power of the few in the hands of the many, is a future with more voices rather than fewer, and is creating more choices instead of an elite option.

Moving at our pace brings a lot of change, complexity, and ambiguity—and a little bit of chaos. Shopifolk thrive on that and are comfortable being uncomfortable. That means Shopify is not the right place for everyone.

Before you apply, consider if you can:

• Care deeply about what you do and about making commerce better for everyone
• Excel by seeking professional and personal hypergrowth
• Keep up with an unrelenting pace (the week, not the quarter)
• Be resilient and resourceful in face of ambiguity and thrive on (rather than endure) change
• Bring critical thought and opinion
• Embrace differences and disagreement to get stuff done and move forward
• Work digital-first for your daily work

Job Description

Machine Learning is a crucial part of Shopify’s mission to make commerce better for everyone. We organize and interpret petabytes of data to build state of the art merchant- and buyer- facing products powered by ML. 

As an Applied Machine Learning expert at Shopify, you'll be at the forefront of training and deploying ML systems at scale, directly empowering our merchants. Shopify is in a unique position to build state of the art ML systems the way they should be built with the resources of a world class e-commerce leader. The number of applications for ML systems at Shopify is vast. There are many different product lines looking for Applied ML Experts

Areas where you can contribute your ML expertise include:

Sidekick

We're looking to hire someone who can provide technical leadership as we use generative AI to create purpose-built solutions for entrepreneurs. We recently announced Sidekick (Tobi, our CEO describes it best) which is a perfect example of how AI can help our merchants succeed.

Shop

Working on our direct to consumer app (Shop), the goal is to create more value for buyers and merchants. This role is focused on building the next generation of search, discovery, trust and personalization algorithms, incorporating and evolving the state of the art techniques. 

Search & Product Discovery

Shopify storefront is the front end of a Shopify store that customers interact with. It is the public-facing part of the store where customers can browse products, add items to their cart, and checkout.  Work on this team focuses on helping connect buyers to products that they are interested in through the development of online discovery, search, recommendation, conversion optimization, and ranking systems.

Ads

Leveraging multiple statistical techniques, we are helping merchants allocate budgets more effectively, target specific audiences with personalized ads, and achieve improved results in terms of ROI and ad performance. More in general, we are building data products that improve the ability of our merchants to do effective advertising.  

Financial Services

Shopify is building a financial services suite to power the Shopify economy and to meet our merchants financial needs.  As part of this initiative, we are creating proprietary machine learning algorithms to enhance underwriting capabilities for lending products like Shopify Capital and Shopify Credit. Additionally, these algorithms will bolster fraud detection and mitigation capabilities for Shopify Balance, Bill Pay, and overall risk management for our range of products and services. This work involves redefining merchant engagement with financial tools, guiding the development of machine learning models and features that will drive the next generation of financial products offered by Shopify.

If any of the above areas appeal we’d love to hear from you.  

Key outputs

• Developing, deploying and maintaining end-to-end machine learning systems at scale
• Producing system design and architecture of scalable AI/ML systems
• Designing and implementing robust data pipelines for training models and fine-tuning LLMs
• Solving high impact data problems and delivering business impact through data and machine learning products
• Prioritizing and communicating to technical and non-technical audiences alike
• Mentoring senior data scientists

Qualifications

Moving at our pace brings a lot of change, complexity, and ambiguity—and a little bit of chaos. Shopifolk thrive on that and are comfortable being uncomfortable. That means Shopify is not the right place for everyone.

Before you apply, consider if you can:

• Care deeply about what you do and about making commerce better for everyone
• Excel by seeking professional and personal hypergrowth
• Keep up with an unrelenting pace (the week, not the quarter)
• Be resilient and resourceful in face of ambiguity and thrive on (rather than endure) change
• Bring critical thought and opinion — and embrace differences and disagreement to get shit done and move forward
• Work digital-first for your daily work

Additional Information

We know that applying to a new role takes a lot of work and we truly value your time. Nicole

is looking forward to reading your application. Please send us a few samples of your work: portfolio, wireframes, UX flows, publications, or whatever represents what you do best.

At Shopify, we are committed to building and fostering an environment where our employees

feel included, valued, and heard. Our belief is that a strong commitment to diversity and

inclusion enables us to truly make commerce better for everyone. We strongly encourage

applications from Indigenous peoples, racialized people, people with disabilities, people from

gender and sexually diverse communities and/or people with intersectional identities.