Staff Engineer - Recommendations

VRChat, the social VR platform where millions of users create and explore virtual worlds together, is hiring a Staff Engineer to build the data infrastructure behind its recommendation systems. VRChat is a 100% remote company with staff working from anywhere in the world.

This role sits at the intersection of data engineering and product: the team is moving VRChat's content discovery from simple heuristics toward sophisticated, data-backed personalization, and this position owns much of the pipeline and backend work that makes that possible.

Responsibilities:

• Develop and optimize scalable data pipelines, backend services, and APIs for data-driven features like recommendations
• Design data models that support both analytical needs and real-time systems
• Collaborate closely with data scientists and product managers on data capture and processing strategy
• Implement data processing jobs using big data technologies
• Contribute to VRChat's evolution from heuristic-based content surfacing to sophisticated, data-backed personalization
• Design backend systems including REST/WebSocket APIs and caching layers
• Participate in on-call rotation for operational incidents

Requirements:

• 3+ years of software engineering experience with a focus on data engineering and scalable backend systems
• Production-grade experience building data pipelines (ETL/ELT)
• Strong SQL skills and database optimization experience
• Experience with big data technologies such as Spark, Hadoop/Beam, or Kafka
• Cloud-scale experience on AWS or Google Cloud
• Proficiency in Python and JavaScript/Node.js, with experience in MongoDB and Redis
• Familiarity with Elasticsearch, data warehousing, and ML systems

Nice to have:

• Experience with content discovery or recommendation systems specifically
• Familiarity with the VRChat platform
• Background in social networks or user-generated content systems
• Experience in consumer product or marketplace environments

What VRChat offers:

• A fully remote role at a company built from the ground up to work this way — "Work from anywhere," with no home-office requirement
• Ownership of a high-impact, high-visibility system (recommendations) at a platform used by millions
• Direct collaboration with data science and product teams shaping VRChat's next generation of content discovery

VRChat's engineering org spans many time zones already, so this is a genuinely global search rather than a remote label on an office-centric role.

To apply, use the "Apply for this job" button on VRChat's Lever-hosted job posting.