Staff Engineer - Recommendations

About VRChat

VRChat offers a first-of-its-kind, game-changing platform that provides an endless collection of social VR experiences and gives the power of creation to its robust community. With over 250,000 worlds and growing, VRChat’s vision is to allow users to bring their imaginations to life and help shape the metaverse anywhere in the world on any device. VRChat has raised $100M to date with the support of investors, Makers Fund, Anthos Capital and HTC.

Job Overview

We’re looking for a data / ML engineer to join our Social Experience team. You will be instrumental in developing and refining the data-driven recommendations systems that help our users connect, interact, and discover content and communities. This role involves working with AWS, Python/FastAPI, Node.js, and Snowflake to build, train, and operationalize personalization systems. You will process and transform large volumes of data generated by our platform to create meaningful user experiences.

What You'll Do

• Work within a full-stack team of engineers to develop, maintain, and optimize scalable data pipelines, backend services, and APIs for data-driven features like recommendations, content discovery, groups, and events in VRChat.
• Design and implement data models and schemas that support both analytical needs and real-time recommendation systems.
• Collaborate with data scientists, product managers, and other engineers to ensure the correct data is captured, processed, and available to power meaningful user experiences.
• Implement and maintain data processing jobs using big data technologies (e.g., Spark, Kafka) to handle large-scale datasets.
• Contribute to the evolution of technical and product capabilities, helping progress from simple heuristics to more sophisticated, data-backed personalization for content and experiences.
• Participate in the design and implementation of backend systems including REST and websocket APIs, caching systems, queueing systems, and cloud orchestration.
• Be available to occasionally jump into action to solve an outage.

Qualifications

• 3+ years of experience in software engineering, with a strong focus on data engineering and building scalable backend systems for SaaS products or online platforms.
• Proven experience building and optimizing production-grade data pipelines (ETL/ELT).
• Strong proficiency in SQL and experience with database optimization for both analytical queries and high-throughput real-time access.
• Experience with big data technologies such as Spark, Hadoop/Beam, or Kafka.
• Experience with cloud providers at scale, such as AWS or Google Cloud.
• Able to work in a variety of languages and technologies, such as Python, JavaScript/Node.js, Mongo, and Redis.
• Experience with Elasticsearch, data warehousing, and machine learning (ML) systems.
• An agile, collaborative mindset and excellent communication skills, capable of working effectively in a remote, cross-functional team environment.

Bonus Points

• Experience building and scaling aspects of content discovery or recommendation systems.
• Demonstrated interest in online communities, VR, or VRChat (as a user or creator).
• Experience with social networks, social graphs, or systems dealing with user-generated content.
• Experience working on consumer products, e-commerce, or two-sided marketplaces.

Benefits

• Work from anywhere: 100% remote company offering flexible working hours with core hours for real-time collaboration
• Comprehensive health benefits
• 401(k) for US employees & Group RRSP for Canadian employees
• Stock options
• Generous paid holiday schedule
• Unlimited / flexible vacation time
• Paid parental leave benefits