Applied Machine Learning Engineer

As the Applied Machine Learning Engineer, you’ll build and operate the ML systems behind Best Buy’s search, product discovery, gift recommendations, and homepage personalization — experiences used by millions of customers every day. This is a hands-on role spanning the full ML lifecycle: building training pipelines for data scientists, productionizing models as low-latency services, and owning monitoring and alerting in production. You’ll partner with ML Scientists and Data Engineers to turn research into reliable, scalable systems and keep them running smoothly.

This role is hybrid, which means you will work some days at our corporate office in Richfield, Minnesota, and some days virtually from home or another non-Best Buy location. The specific work arrangements vary by role and team. The recruiter or hiring manager will provide more details during the hiring process. 

What you’ll do 

• Build and maintain ML training pipelines and infrastructure (Vertex AI Pipelines, BigQuery, GCS) that enable data scientists to train and evaluate models
• Productionize ML models as real-time, low-latency services using Cloud Run, Vertex AI, and containerized microservices
• Set up and own monitoring, logging, and alerting for production ML services
• Develop feature engineering, embedding, and data pipelines using GCP data services
• Partner with Data Scientists and ML Researchers to take models from research to production and iterate based on real-world performance

Candidates should be prepared to clearly explain their personal contributions to past AI or ML work, including challenges faced and decisions made. This role requires hands-on, independent technical work. During interviews and any assessments, candidates are expected to complete work without the use of AI assistance and speak directly to their own experience, unless told otherwise.

Basic qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Math, or related field (or equivalent experience) 
• 3 years of experience in ML/AI, data engineering, or software development 
• 3 years of experience building, deploying, and serving real-time ML/AI models with ultra-low latency and high throughput, as resilient, scalable, cloud native services
• 2 years of experience building data engineering pipelines, ML/AI driven products or other related functions (e.g. software engineering, data science) 
• 2 years of Python and SQL skills
• 2 years of experience in software design, test-driven development, and implementation using a general-purpose programming language (e.g., Python, Scala, Rust, C , etc.)
• Solid understanding of supervised/unsupervised learning, deep learning, and Gen AI

Preferred qualifications

• Master’s degree in a quantitative field plus 2 years experience in ML/AI
• 5 years of professional experience
• Experience with GCP: Vertex AI, Cloud Run, Cloud Functions, BigQuery, or GCS
• Hands-on with ML model serving (FastAPI, Vertex AI endpoints, or similar) and Docker/Kubernetes
• Familiarity with embeddings, vector search, or information retrieval systems
• Experience with monitoring and observability for production ML systems
• Exposure to PyTorch, Hugging Face Transformers, or LLMs/generative AI in production

What’s in it for you
We’re committed to helping our people thrive at work and at home. We offer generous benefits that support your total well-being and provide help when you need it most.
Our benefits include: 

• Competitive pay 
• Generous employee discount 
• Physical and mental well-being support

About us
As part of the Best Buy team, you’ll help us fulfill our purpose to enrich lives through technology. We bring that to life every day by humanizing and personalizing tech solutions for every stage of life — in our stores, online and in customers’ homes. Our culture is built on deeply supporting and valuing our amazing employees who make it all possible.

We’re committed to being a great place to work, where you can unlock unique career possibilities. Above all, we aim to provide a place where you can bring your full, authentic self to work now and into the future. Tomorrow works here.™

Best Buy is an equal opportunity employer.