Machine Learning Engineer

About Us:

Ground News is a platform that makes it easy to compare news sources, read between the lines of media bias, and break free from algorithms.

In a world where political polarization and media distrust are at an all-time high, Ground News offers people a better way to stay informed and open-minded. Our mobile app, web app, and browser extension are home to a community of mindful readers who use our news comparison platform to easily see every side of a story and engage with news beyond their filter bubble.

Unlike most news companies, our values do not align with any specific political ideology. Unlike most tech platforms, we don’t rely on algorithms to keep users on our platform to sell ads. We are supported by our subscribers to build a more nuanced understanding of the news, the world, and themselves.

Highlights:

• #1 on Product Hunt (Oct 19, '20), #2 (Nov 17, '21), #2 (Mar 26, '21)

• #2 on 2025 Apple Design Awards in the Social Impact category

• Techstars portfolio company

• 3-time winner of US App of the Day

• Winner of Digital News Innovation Challenge by Facebook

• Winner of Mobile Apps Showdown at CES

The Opportunity: Machine Learning Engineer

You’ll be at the forefront of pioneering AI applications purpose-built for the modern news landscape. With access to an expansive dataset of 60,000+ articles ingested daily from over 50,000 global sources, you’ll push the boundaries of what Large Language Models can do, building features that enable our users to see every side of the story and think freely.

What You’ll Do:

• Own and maintain production pipelines that process hundreds of thousands of news articles daily.

• Curate and catalog news content meticulously for use in downstream ML applications.

• Build state-of-the-art ML solutions to power features such as article clustering and content recommendations.

• Design and build robust evaluation datasets to benchmark model performance.

• Help manage dozens of microservices written and maintained by our ML team.

• Lead deployment processes, including blue-green deployments and rollbacks against real-time production data streams.

What You’ll Bring:

• Proven hands-on experience in developing, deploying, and maintaining ML pipelines, including recommendation engines, clustering, and full MLOps workflows.

• Strong familiarity with infrastructure-as-code tools (Terraform) and orchestration with Kubernetes on AWS or GCP.

• Experience with data management through ElasticSearch and Postgres.

• Professional experience as an MLOps or DevOps engineer, with strong foundations in Python and cloud-native tooling (AWS or GCP, Kubernetes)

• 3-6 years of applied, hands-on experience in ML at scale, with end-to-end ownership across deployment, maintenance, and iteration.

• Expertise in autoscaling Kubernetes workloads using tools like KEDA and SQS.

• Proficiency in Python (required), Go (nice-to-have), and Node.js.

• Hands-on experience with LLM (OpenAI, Gemini, Llama3), including prompt engineering and local deployment frameworks like vLLM.

• Experience building semantic search pipelines, including information retrieval and document indexing via PGVector or equivalent tools.

Bonus Points:

• A deep curiosity and interest in the political system, and the intersection between tech and media.

• Familiarity with Ground News’ products (app, website, extension, newsletters).

Why Work at Ground?

Co-founded by a former NASA engineer and Bain consultant, Ground News offers a fast-paced, mission-driven environment where experimentation is encouraged, and impact is immediate. You’ll have the autonomy to shape strategy, the support of a collaborative team, and the satisfaction of building a product that’s helping people become more informed and open-minded. We’re proudly remote, with our roots in Kitchener, Ontario, and you may work from anywhere in Canada.

Salary Range:

$110,000 – $140,000 (CAD)

Final compensation will be determined based on a variety of factors, including relevant experience, skills, and alignment with the role’s responsibilities. We’re committed to equitable and competitive compensation that reflects market benchmarks, internal equity, and individual contributions.

Ground News is an equitable workplace that celebrates diverse perspectives and lived experiences. We build an inclusive environment where everyone feels respected, supported, and empowered to do their best work.

If you have any questions, concerns, or require any accessibility accommodations during our interview process, please contact talent@ground.news and we’ll be happy to support you.