Search - Workchat - Senior Data Scientist

Referral Board; Canada; Remote; CAD 128,000 - 203,000; Full time

Job summary

A technology company in Canada is looking for a Senior Data Scientist to join their Conversational Experiences team. The candidate will build and evaluate systems that enable customers to interact with their data. Responsibilities include designing evaluation pipelines, collaborating with engineers, and driving product decisions based on results. This position offers a competitive salary ranging from $128,300 to $203,000 CAD and various employee benefits.

Benefits

Health coverage

Flexible schedule

Generous vacation days

Parental leave

Matching donations

Qualifications

• Strong IR/NLP experience including RAG and vector search.
• Proficiency in Python and relevant libraries.
• Hands-on evaluation expertise in metrics and A/B testing.

Responsibilities

• Design and maintain evaluation pipelines for conversational search.
• Build and compare retrieval and re-ranking baselines.
• Collaborate with engineers on contracts and translate findings.

Skills

IR/NLP experience

Python

PyTorch/Transformers

Reproducible experiments

Evaluation expertise

Communication skills

Education

5–8 years in applied DS/ML

Tools

Elasticsearch

MLflow

Job description

What is The Role

The Search Conversational Experiences team builds Elastic’s new conversational (agentic) platform that lets customers chat with their own data in Elasticsearch. We own the quality layer for RAG, agents and tools, retrieval/citations, streaming, memory, and—crucially—the evaluation signals that turn open-ended questions into grounded, reliable answers. As a Senior Data Scientist, you’ll be part of a cross-functional team (backend, DS, PM, UX) driving chat quality end-to-end: designing and running evaluation pipelines, improving prompts and tool behaviors, and turning measurements into product decisions that customers can feel.

You’ll help tackle frontier problems—folding RAG and vector search into an agent’s knowledge base, dynamically enriching model context to boost groundedness, shaping agent routing and tool selection policies, lighting up agent-driven visualizations on top of Elasticsearch data, and exploring multimodality and reasoning strategies where they truly move the needle. This is an applied role: you will prototype, evaluate, and partner with engineers to ship.

What You Will Be Doing

• Design and maintain offline/online evaluation pipelines for conversational search: golden sets, rubric/LLM-as-judge calibration, groundedness/citation checks, and A/B tests.
• Build and compare retrieval & re-ranking baselines (sparse + dense), query understanding, and semantic rewrites; land improvements with clear metrics.
• Use results to drive product decisions: model selection, efficient agent routing, tool gating, and agent customization for Elastic use cases in search and beyond.
• Instrument dashboards and telemetry so helpfulness, faithfulness, latency, and cost trade-offs are visible and trustworthy; guard against regressions in CI.
• Collaborate tightly with backend engineers on contracts (ES|QL, citations, telemetry), and with PM/UX to translate findings into shipped features.
• Share outcomes clearly (docs, notebooks, PRs) and mentor peers in experiment design and evaluation craft.

What You Will Bring

• 5–8 years in applied DS/ML with strong IR/NLP experience (RAG, dense/sparse retrieval, re-ranking, vector search).
• Proficiency in Python, PyTorch/Transformers, Pandas; reproducible experiments (e.g., MLflow), versioned datasets, and clean, reviewable code.
• Hands-on evaluation expertise: offline metrics (nDCG/MRR/Recall@k), LLM-as-judge calibration, groundedness/citation scoring, and online A/B testing.
• Experience turning experimental results into clear product calls (models, routing, tools) and communicating them crisply to cross-functional partners.
• Practical Elasticsearch experience (or similar); ES|QL familiarity is a plus.
• Comfort working in a distributed, async-first environment; strong written communication; low-ego collaboration.

If this sounds interesting, we would love to hear from you! Please include whatever info you believe is relevant: resume, GitHub profile, code samples, blog posts and writing samples, links to personal projects, etc.

Compensation for this role is in the form of base salary. This role does not have a variable compensation component. The typical starting salary range for new hires in this role is listed below.

These ranges represent the lowest to highest salary we reasonably and in good faith believe we would pay for this role at the time of this posting. We may ultimately pay more or less than the posted range, and the ranges may be modified in the future.

An employee's position within the salary range will be based on several factors including, but not limited to, relevant education, qualifications, certifications, experience, skills, geographic location, performance, and business or organizational needs.

Elastic believes that employees should have the opportunity to share in the value that we create together for our shareholders. Therefore, in addition to cash compensation, this role is currently eligible to participate in Elastic's stock program. Our total rewards package also includes a company-matched RRSP with dollar-for-dollar matching up to 6% of eligible earnings, along with a range of other benefits offered with a holistic emphasis on employee well-being.

The typical starting salary range for this role is:

$128,300 - $203,000 CAD

Additional Information - We Take Care of Our People

As a distributed company, diversity drives our identity. Elastic is the type of company where you can balance great work with great life. Your age is only a number. It doesn’t matter if you’re just out of college or your children are; we need you for what you can do.

We strive to have parity of benefits across regions and while regulations differ from place to place, we believe taking care of our people is the right thing to do.

• Competitive pay based on the work you do here and not your previous salary
• Health coverage for you and your family in many locations
• Ability to craft your calendar with flexible locations and schedules for many roles
• Generous number of vacation days each year
• Increase your impact - We match up to $2000 (or local currency equivalent) for financial donations and service
• Up to 40 hours each year to use toward volunteer projects you love
• Embracing parenthood with minimum of 16 weeks of parental leave

Elastic is an equal opportunity/affirmative action employer committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion. Qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, ethnicity, color, religion, sex, pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, age, marital status, or any other basis protected by law.

We welcome individuals with disabilities and strive to create an accessible and inclusive experience for all individuals. To request an accommodation during the application or the recruiting process, please email [e-mail]. We will reply to your request within 24 business hours of submission.

Elasticsearch develops and distributes encryption software and technology that is subject to export controls. If you are located in or are a national of certain sanctioned countries or regions, an export license may be required as a condition of employment. National origin and/or nationality do not affect eligibility for employment with Elastic.

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Apply for this job

To apply, please submit your resume and details through the Elastic careers site.