Principal Machine Learning Engineer; Search Platform

WELCOME TO OLX

We're building marketplace sustainable ecosystems that millions of people depend on every month – to buy and sell cars, find homes, land jobs, and trade secondhand goods. It's commerce that matters:
safe
, smart
, and environmentally responsible
.

We do this with courage to innovate,
commitment to outcomes,
collaboration across 50+ nationalities and 8+ markets, and a customer-led approach that puts real people first. Add a desire to win – and you get a culture that's ambitious, fast-moving, and built on trust.

Our brands – including OLX, Otomoto, and Otodom – are loved by millions. And we're backed by Prosus, one of the world's largest tech investors.

Join OLX and see how far you can go.

JOIN OLX SEARCH PLATFORM AI TEAM

We’re on a mission to transform how millions of people discover and connect with what they need most - across Motors, Real Estate, Jobs, Services, and Goods. To achieve this, we’re building a new Search AI Platform that will power intelligent, personalized, and scalable search experiences across all OLX customer units.

This initiative is sponsored directly by our CTO and represents a strategic leap for OLX: a new cross‑functional team built from the ground up, bringing together machine learning engineers, data scientists, SREs, and platform engineers. Together, we’re redefining how search intelligence is built, shared, and scaled across our global ecosystem.

As the Principal Search Machine Learning Engineer
, you’ll be the technical guiding force behind this transformation. You’ll work alongside our Principal Search Engineer to shape the architecture, mentor the team, and deliver solutions that bring measurable business and user impact. You’ll have full ownership to explore, experiment, and push boundaries - from prototyping new search models to deploying them at scale.

You’ll also play a key role in growing OLX’s data science practice, mentoring peers, and shaping how AI is applied across the company. This is a hands‑on leadership opportunity where you’ll see your ideas move from research to production and into the hands of millions of users.

• Shape the future of AI‑powered search across all OLX verticals. You’ll drive the technical vision, guide a multidisciplinary team, and ensure our Search AI Platform becomes a foundation for scalable, intelligent discovery experiences for millions of users.
• Lead the design and evolution of OLX’s Search AI Platform, developing LLM‑ and GenAI‑based systems that power discovery and relevance across Motors, Real Estate, Jobs, and Goods.
• Partner with the Principal Search Engineer to define and implement a unified technical strategy for search, ranking, and retrieval at scale.
• Guide a cross‑functional team of ML engineers, data scientists, and platform engineers, fostering technical excellence, experimentation, and rapid iteration.
• Prototype, evaluate, and product ionize new ML models, including embedding‑based retrieval, personalization, and relevance optimization.
• Collaborate with product and analytics teams to define success metrics, integrate with A/B testing pipelines, and measure real customer impact.
• Mentor and inspire data scientists and ML engineers across OLX’s global hubs, sharing best practices and shaping the future of applied ML at scale.
• Stay hands‑on, driving implementation in Python and AWS while exploring state‑of‑the‑art advances in LLMs, GenAI, and search infrastructure.
• Promote a culture of learning and innovation, helping the team iterate fast, fail fast, and learn continuously.

• Based in Poland with the ability to collaborate across global teams.
• Strategic and hands‑on technical leader who thrives at the intersection of machine learning, large‑scale systems, and product impact.
• Deep expertise in search and relevance, including ranking models, retrieval systems, and modern representation learning (e.g., embeddings, transformers).
• Proven experience designing and product ionizing ML solutions at scale in real‑world environments.
• Strong background in Generative AI and LLMs, with an understanding of their application to search and content understanding.
• Ability to inspire and lead…