Overview

As a Machine Learning Engineer – Text Search at Phia, you’ll help build and improve the systems that power text-based search and retrieval across the product. You’ll work on models and pipelines that understand user queries, match them to relevant products, and support fast, accurate discovery, collaborating closely with senior ML engineers, backend teams, and product partners while learning how search systems operate at scale in a consumer platform.

About Phia

Phia has raised $43M from Notable Capital, Khosla Ventures, and Kleiner Perkins to build the AI alignment layer for commerce. In under a year, Phia’s consumer shopping agent has surpassed one million users and partnered with 6,200+ retail brands, representing billions in annual gross merchandise volume. Each month, Phia drives millions of dollars in sales for brands and has achieved 11× revenue growth since launch.

In an era where AI vertical agents are reshaping every industry, commerce is on the verge of a complete transformation. Phia is reinventing shopping from a fragmented, impersonal experience into one that feels intelligent, trusted, and built around each user’s intent. This foundation of trust is our wedge to become the end-to-end shopping destination for the next generation of buyers.

Phia is a lean, high-ownership team building at startup speed. If you want to ship at high velocity and solve complex problems in consumer AI and commerce, this is the place to do it.

What You Own

• Support the development and iteration of text search and retrieval models
• Work on query understanding, ranking, and relevance improvements
• Help build and maintain data pipelines for training and evaluation
• Analyze search quality and user behavior to identify improvement opportunities
• Collaborate with backend and product teams to ship ML improvements into production
• Assist with offline evaluation and online experimentation
• Write clean, maintainable code and learn best practices for production ML systems

Qualifications

• 0–2 years of experience in machine learning, software engineering, or related roles (internships welcome)
• Proficiency in Python and familiarity with common ML libraries
• Basic understanding of information retrieval, NLP, or search systems
• Experience working with structured and unstructured text data
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Statistics, or equivalent practical experience

Compensation Range: $175K - $215K