Staff Applied Scientist, Search & Discovery
Remote
Job Summary
Improve search retrieval and ranking by designing, tuning, and evaluating how members find materials they did not know to ask for. Build recommendation systems from the ground up, modeling member and project intent to surface relevant items across hundreds of brands. Explore behavioral and catalog data to identify strategies for diverse, messy real-world queries, including the long tail. Raise data quality by identifying catalog problems holding relevance back, and apply advanced query understanding to enhance semantic and embedding-based retrieval. Invent formulas, models, and re-ranking approaches, then collaborate with engineering to productionize what proves out. Evaluate image-based search and color matching, including perceptual color, while measuring success through custom evaluation frameworks and experiments. Partner with product, engineering, and catalog teams to turn research into shipped improvements.
Required Qualifications
- A track record building search, recommendations, or ranking systems that shipped to real users and moved the numbers
- An advanced degree in a quantitative field such as computer science, machine learning, statistics, or applied math, or equivalent hands-on experience that got you to the same place
- Deep understanding of search and recommendation systems, especially retrieval, ranking, and relevance
- Strong query understanding and NLP, including semantic and embedding-based retrieval
- Real exploratory and experimental rigor: statistical modeling, experimental design, and hypothesis testing, plus comfort working in ambiguity where the right approach is not yet known
- Hands-on building ability
- Some experience deploying ML or data systems to production, or partnering closely on it
Desired Qualifications
- Experience with multimodal or image-based search, and with color or perceptual science
- E-commerce or marketplace search and recommendations experience
- Experience managing vendor and home-grown systems in conjunction with one another
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