Senior Machine Learning Engineer

Location: London - The River Building HQ

Employment Type: Full time

Department: Deliveroo Cost Center Hierarchy, Technology, Technology, Machine Learning, Machine Learning (Care Tech)

Join us in our mission to transform the way people shop and eat, where impact, innovation, and growth drives everything we do. Our engineering and product teams tackle some of the most exciting challenges in tech, building systems that impact millions daily.

The Data + Science Team:

At Deliveroo we have a world-class data & science organisation, with a mission to enable the highest quality human and machine decision-making. We have over 250 Machine Learning Engineers, Data Scientists, Data Analysts, and Analytics Engineers working throughout the company in product, business and platform teams. We have a strong, active data science community; a robust technical review process; a career progression framework; and plenty of opportunities to learn new things.

The Role:

We’re looking for a Senior Machine Learning Engineer to join our Care team. In this role, you’ll help shape the decision making systems that directly impact customer experience, trust, and fairness at Deliveroo. Care is an area with significant opportunity and real customer impact. This is a new headcount role where you’ll take ownership of existing models and help define strong ML foundations in spaces that are still evolving.

Your work will span two equally impactful areas:

• LLM powered customer support and automation: You’ll help build and evolve machine learning systems that understand customer sentiment and tone of voice, supporting a customer support chatbot powered by large language models. A key part of this work is ensuring quality, reliability, and trust in production ML systems.
• Customer compensation and refund decisions: You’ll design and build machine learning models from the ground up to move beyond static rules and heuristics. These models will determine fair and consistent compensation outcomes across a wide range of customer scenarios, balancing customer satisfaction, cost, and long term trust.

Here’s what your day to day might look like:

• Owning the design, development, and productionisation of machine learning models used in customer support and decision making systems.
• Building monitoring, evaluation, and alerting frameworks to detect model underperformance, drift, or unexpected behaviour.
• Partnering closely with Product Managers, including teams working on decision platforms and customer experience, to turn ambiguous problems into robust ML solutions.
• Working with data scientists and engineers across Deliveroo to productionise models and embed them into scalable systems.
• Providing technical leadership in areas with unclear ownership, setting best practices for ML quality, reliability, and maintainability.

Requirements:

• 5+ years' experience as an ML Engineer or Data Scientist.
• 5+ years' experience writing production code in Python.
• Experience using tools like Git, Docker, Kubernetes, CircleCI.
• Experience productionising Generative AI workstreams or Agentic AI projects.
• You know the fundamentals of Generative AI and have a good understanding of the science behind it, including LLMs, VLMs, transformers and fine-tuning techniques.
• A robust understanding of traditional ML and evaluation techniques, and a good understanding of the research and developments around Generative AI evaluation techniques.
• You get satisfaction from seeing your work shipped and driving measurable impact to the business.
• Experience mentoring others in the team.
• You have a bias to simplicity, where you care most about achieving impact.

Bonus:

• Experience with evaluation harnesses and frameworks for Generative AI.
• Experience with observability, monitoring, and safety techniques for deployed GenAI systems.
• Experience in strongly typed languages such as Go.

Why Join Us?

At Deliveroo, you’ll do work that matters, solving real world problems in a three sided marketplace that’s constantly evolving. Working here you can expect:

• High autonomy to own problem spaces and build ML systems that directly impact customer trust and experience.
• Support to learn and grow, from mentoring to learning and development programmes.
• A strong focus on wellbeing, with benefits including Headspace, Gympass, and more.
• A place to belong, with a global workforce and active employee communities.

Diversity, Equity and Inclusion:

At Deliveroo, we know that a great workplace reflects the world around us and that true diversity and inclusion make us stronger, more creative, and better at what we do. We believe in equality of opportunity and welcome candidates from all backgrounds regardless of age, gender, ethnicity, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity, socio-economic background, religion, or belief.

If you have a disability or long term health condition and need support to apply for one of our roles, or if you require any reasonable adjustments during the recruitment process, please contact our recruitment team at accommodations@deliveroo.co.uk and we’ll be happy to help ensure you have a fair and equitable experience.

Ready to help shape the future of customer care and trust at Deliveroo? Apply today.