Machine Learning Team Lead

What You'll Do: Criteo is looking for a Lead Machine Learning Engineer to take ownership of the Reco Ranker team, at the heart of Criteo's engine.
In close partnership with the Reco Retrieval team, the Reco Ranker team builds and operates the algorithms that determine, for every display, which products to show and in what order. The team's mission is to maximize relevance and performance at massive scale—ranking hundreds of candidate products under 10ms latency, for billions of ad impressions daily.
As a Lead ML Engineer, you will:

• Lead and mentor a team of engineers: fostering a collaborative and innovative environment. This includes hiring, onboarding, and developing team members to ensure high performance and career growth (1:1, annual reviews,...)
• Own and deliver the team's roadmap, with a strong focus on shipping and scaling robust ranking models in production, while keeping an eye on innovation through targeted research efforts.
• Act as a technical leader and hands-on contributor, driving design, prioritization and development decisions while mentoring and empowering the team.
• Design, train, and deploy at scale deep learning models for real-time product ranking—generic enough to scale across thousands of clients, yet adaptive to their individual needs.
• Ensure production-readiness at scale: build efficient and reliable pipelines that meet demanding latency and throughput requirements.
• Navigate the need for compromises and make informed trade-offs between competing priorities, system constraints, and modeling strategies.
• Collaborate closely with stakeholders, product, and technical teams to shape priorities, ensure continuous alignment on goals, and streamline integration paths.

Who You Are:

• You have a strong background in machine learning, ideally with hands-on experience in deep learning applied to recommendation, ranking, or personalization problems.
• You managed a team or mentored other engineers.
• You are skilled in software engineering, including production-grade systems and distributed computation (e.g., Python, C++, Scala, Spark).
• You have experience leading technical teams, setting direction, and mentoring others, while maintaining a collaborative, hands-on mindset.
• You are comfortable navigating trade-offs between innovation, reliability, and scalability, and you bring structure and clarity to complex challenges.
• You are motivated by impact at scale, and excited to optimize algorithms that run millions of times per second and directly drive business value.
• You bring a positive, pragmatic, and solutions-oriented mindset, and thrive in fast-paced environments where focus and resilience are key.

If you're passionate about building cutting-edge recommender systems and leading high-performing teams in a fast-paced, data-driven environment, come help shape the future of commerce media at Criteo.

We acknowledge that many candidates may not meet every single role requirement listed above. If your experience looks a little different from our requirements but you believe that you can still bring value to the role, we'd love to see your application​

Who We Are:

Criteo is a leader in commerce media, helping brands, agencies, and publishers create meaningful consumer connections through AI-powered advertising solutions. We're shaping a more open and sustainable digital future for advertising.  

At Criteo, our culture is as unique as it is diverse. From our offices across the globe or from the comfort of home, our 3,600 Criteos collaborate together to build an open, impactful, and forward-thinking environment.  

We foster a workplace where everyone is valued, and employment decisions are based solely on skills, qualifications, and business needs—never on non-job-related factors or legally protected characteristics.  

What We Offer:

Ways of working – Our hybrid model blends home with in-office experiences, making space for both.  
Grow with us – Learning, mentorship & career development programs.  
Your wellbeing matters – Health benefits, wellness perks & mental health support.  
A team that cares – Diverse, inclusive, and globally connected.  
Fair pay & perks – Attractive salary, with performance-based rewards and family-friendly policies, plus the potential for equity depending on role and level.  

Additional benefits may vary depending on the country where you work and the nature of your employment with Criteo.  

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