Senior Data Scientist, Buyer

Vinted; Amsterdam; Hybrid; EUR 68,000 - 92,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Share options programme

25 days paid annual leave

Newest MacBook models

Employee Assistance Program (EAP)

Home office budget €540 for furniture

Lunch benefit

Job summary

Vinted is seeking a Data Scientist for the Buyer Domain to build and optimize ML models powering search relevance and personalized homepage recommendations. You will work on real-time ranking, dense retrieval, and large-scale personalization within a collaborative, hybrid-work environment.

Expect to partner with engineers and data teams, design experiments, and contribute to product decisions that impact millions of listings across Europe.

Qualifications

• Hands-on experience designing, training, and deploying ML models in production.
• Strong Python and SQL proficiency.
• Solid understanding of IR / Learning-to-Rank (LTR) and semantic search.
• Experience with high-performance model serving is a plus.

Responsibilities

• Build and optimize end‑to‑end machine learning models for retrieval, ranking, and personalization.
• Partner with platform/engineers to serve models in search/recommendation engines.
• Lead or contribute to design proposals for new modeling approaches.
• Define tracking requirements and design offline evaluations and online A/B tests.
• Collaborate with Data, Engineering and Product stakeholders to identify opportunities and trade-offs.
• Share knowledge and contribute to ML Guild and Data Science & Analytics growth.

Skills

Python

SQL

Machine Learning

Information Retrieval

MLOps

Vespa

Elasticsearch

Triton

Tools

Vespa

Elasticsearch

Triton

Job description

Brief Info About Vinted

Our mission is to make second‑hand the first choice, and we're looking for people who want to help us get there. Every day, we work together to help our members buy and sell pre‑loved clothing and lifestyle items, giving each piece a second life – or even a third.

Brief Info About Vinted

Our mission is to make second‑hand the first choice, and we're looking for people who want to help us get there. Every day, we work together to help our members buy and sell pre‑loved clothing and lifestyle items, giving each piece a second life – or even a third.

Founded in 2008 in Lithuania, Vinted began as a way for friends to find new homes for clothes they no longer needed. In 2019, we became Lithuania's first unicorn! Today, our headquarters remain in Vilnius, and we've grown with offices across Europe, supported by a team of over 2,000 people. Vinted Marketplace is Europe’s leading platform for second‑hand fashion and a go‑to destination for all kinds of pre‑loved items, with a growing range of categories. Our platform connects millions of members across 20+ markets, helping great items find a new life. Vinted Go enhances the shipping experience with a vast network of over 500,000 pick‑up and drop‑off points, partnering with more than 60 carriers across Europe, with added services like item verification for peace of mind on high‑value pieces. Vinted Pay is the newest part of the Vinted Group, dedicated to bringing secure, reliable payments to buyers and sellers across Europe. Seamlessly integrated into the Vinted app, it helps keep every transaction safe, efficient, and easy for our members.

Information About The Position

The Buyer Domain at Vinted is dedicated to creating a seamless, delightful, and highly engaging experience for our members as they search, discover, and purchase items. Our challenge is unique: unlike standard e-commerce, our peer‑to‑peer catalog consists of hundreds of millions of entirely unique, single‑inventory listings, with millions of new items uploaded daily. Connecting the right buyer with the perfect item in real‑time is at the very core of Vinted's success.

To tackle this challenge at scale, we are looking to bring talented Data Scientists into the Buyer Domain's two highly specialized, ML-focused teams:

• Search Relevance: This team is responsible for the retrieval and ranking systems that power search queries across all markets. Their mission is to ensure our members can effortlessly find exactly what they are looking for in Vinted's vast, unique catalog. The team's ownership and focus areas include multi‑stage search ranking pipelines, query intent classification, semantic dense retrieval, and the integration of ML relevance models with content policy controls, all optimized for real‑time execution.
• Recommender Relevance: This team owns the Recommender System that powers Vinted’s Homepage Feed and which is responsible for driving a significant portion of all discoveries and purchases across the platform. Their mission is to inspire our members by surfacing highly personalized, engaging, and relevant recommendations. The team's ownership and focus areas include deep sequence‑based user modeling, real‑time candidate generation and ranking, and exploration of diverse member interests, built to handle massive scale and high‑throughput constraints.

We will work with you to match your background, technical interests, and experience with the team where you can drive the most impact. Regardless of the team you join, you will be a proactive product partner. We work in a highly collaborative culture to align on technical approaches, and we validate all changes through rigorous offline evaluation and online A/B testing on our custom-built, in‑house Experimentation platform.

In this position, you’ll

• Build and optimize end‑to‑end machine learning models for retrieval, ranking, and personalization (e.g. gradient boosting, two‑tower architectures, sequence models, and neural rerankers).
• Partner closely with platform and software engineers to serve models directly in our search and recommendation engines, optimizing for high throughput and millisecond‑level latency budgets.
• Lead or contribute to collaborative design proposals for new modeling approaches, features, or training pipelines.
• Define tracking requirements, perform offline evaluations, and design and analyze online A/B tests to measure real‑world business impact.
• Collaborate with Data, Engineering and Product stakeholders to identify product opportunities, translate business problems into ML objectives, and align on technical trade‑offs.
• Share knowledge, participate in peer reviews, and actively contribute to the growth and development of other scientists in the ML Guild and the Data Science & Analytics function.

About You

• A strong collaborator with hands‑on experience designing, training, and deploying machine learning models in a production environment (ideally within search, recommendations, or large‑scale personalization).
• High proficiency in Python and SQL. Experience with deep learning frameworks and gradient boosting libraries.
• Solid understanding of modern information retrieval, Learning‑to‑Rank (LTR), semantic search, or sequence‑based user preference modeling.
• Experience or strong interest in high‑performance model serving. Familiarity with search/vector engines like Vespa or Elasticsearch, and serving frameworks like Triton, is a plus.
• Comfort working with massive datasets in modern cloud‑based data warehouses.
• Strong grasp of statistics, offline evaluation metrics, and online A/B testing methodologies.

Work perks

• The opportunity to benefit from our share options programme
• 25 days of paid annual leave
• Newest MacBook models
• Confidential Employee Assistance Program (EAP) for you and your family
• Frequent team‑building events
• Home office support: we provide IT workstation equipment and a personal budget of up to €540 for home workplace furniture
• Lunch benefit per working day
• Access to a discounted gym membership plan
• A personal monthly budget for shopping on Vinted
• Collective Defined Contribution Pension plan
• NS Business Card for your commute to the office by public transport
• The opportunity to spend up to 90 days per year - 21 of which can be spent working outside of the EU - on workation
• A dog‑friendly office

Working at Vinted

Individual Learning Budget

We invest in your professional growth! As part of our commitment to continuous learning, we offer an annual learning budget to support your personal and career development through courses, certifications, workshops and more.

Hybrid Work

We’ve adopted a hybrid workplace model where 2 days in the office are recommended but not enforced. It’s up to you and your team to decide on the exact days you’ll spend working together in person.

Equal Opportunity

The Vinted Group is committed to building an inclusive workplace where people from all walks of life feel a sense of belonging. We welcome applications from people of all backgrounds, identities and life experiences. At Vinted, all applicants are treated fairly without regard to their race, age, religion or belief, sex, national origin, citizenship, gender identity, sexual orientation, disability, or any other protected characteristic.

The annual gross salary range for this position is:
€67.700—€91.500 EUR