Associate Director - Search & Recommendations Science

Wayfair; Mountain View (CA); On-site; USD 270,000 - 330,000; Full time

Job summary

Wayfair seeks an Associate Director to lead the Search & Recommendations ML team. You will define the ML strategy and roadmap across retrieval, ranking, personalization, and recommendations, while growing a high-caliber team of scientists and ML practitioners.

Your work will translate cutting-edge research into scalable, production-grade systems that improve discovery and customer experiences. You will partner with senior leaders across Product, Engineering and Design to drive ambitious

Qualifications

• Lead ML strategy across retrieval, ranking, personalization, and recommendations.
• Mentor and grow scientists and ML practitioners while upholding high technical standards.
• Translate research advances into practical, scalable systems.

Responsibilities

• Set the vision for ML strategy and roadmap across retrieval, ranking, personalization, and recommendations.
• Lead and grow an exceptional ML team by recruiting, mentoring, and developing scientists and practitioners.
• Translate advances in information retrieval, recommender systems, foundation models, multimodal learning, and generative AI into customer experiences.
• Reimagine product discovery by building systems that anticipate customer tastes and inspire new possibilities.
• Build ML at Wayfair scale with large-scale retrieval and recommendation systems.
• Drive measurable impact through rigorous experimentation and evaluation.
• Collaborate with Product, Engineering, and Design leaders to align priorities and deliver production experiences.

Skills

Leadership

Information Retrieval

Ranking

Personalization

Experimentation

Communication

Education

PhD

MS

BS

Tools

LLMs

Foundation models

Multimodal frameworks

Job description

Salary Range: $300,000 per year. Individual compensation is determined by skills, qualifications, experience, and location. Compensation details listed in this posting reflect the annual base salary only and does not include equity.

About The Team

The Search & Recommendations Machine Learning team is building the intelligence that powers product discovery at Wayfair. Our ambition goes beyond helping customers find what they are looking for. We want to transform Wayfair into a destination where customers don’t just shop, but dream about the home they long to create, with experiences that anticipate their tastes, inspire their imagination, and feel uniquely theirs.

We work at the intersection of information retrieval, recommender systems, personalization, foundation models, and multimodal AI, translating advances from academia and industry into customer experiences at massive scale. As an Associate Director, you will lead the scientific and technical direction of this space, shape the team and roadmap, and help redefine how millions of customers discover products they love.

Responsibilities

• Set the vision for Search & Recommendations: Define and drive the ML strategy and roadmap across retrieval, ranking, personalization, recommendations, and customer understanding.
• Lead and grow an exceptional ML team: Recruit, mentor, and develop scientists and ML practitioners while fostering high technical standards, ownership, and rapid experimentation.
• Push the technical frontier: Translate advances in information retrieval, recommender systems, foundation models, multimodal learning, and generative AI into differentiated customer experiences.
• Reimagine product discovery: Evolve our systems beyond responding to explicit queries toward experiences that understand customers’ evolving tastes, anticipate what they might love, and inspire new possibilities.
• Build ML at Wayfair scale: Guide the development of large-scale retrieval and recommendation systems spanning semantic and multimodal retrieval, learning-to-rank, customer and product representations, and sequential modeling.
• Drive measurable impact: Establish rigorous experimentation and evaluation, connecting scientific advances to meaningful customer and business outcomes.
• Lead across the organization: Partner with senior leaders across Product, Engineering, and Design to shape strategy, align priorities, and turn ambitious ideas into production experiences.

Qualifications

• PhD with 8+ years of experience, MS with 10+ years of experience, or BS with 12+ years of experience in Search, Recommendations, or Personalization.
• Significant experience leading teams in Search, Recommendations, Information Retrieval, Ranking, Personalization, or related ML domains.
• Deep technical expertise in several areas such as recommender systems, retrieval and ranking, personalization.
• Strong understanding of modern ML, including foundation models, LLMs, vision-language models, and generative approaches, and the judgment to translate promising research into practical systems.
• Demonstrated success defining technical strategy and delivering large-scale ML systems with measurable impact.
• Proven ability to recruit, mentor, and develop strong ML talent and raise the technical bar of an organization.
• Strong expertise in experimentation, statistical modeling, and online/offline evaluation.
• Excellent communication and influence skills, with experience aligning senior technical and product stakeholders.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with large-scale Search & Recommendations in e-commerce, marketplaces, or consumer technology.
• Experience with modern retrieval and recommendation architectures, multimodal models, sequential recommendation, graph-based learning, bandits, or generative recommendation.
• Track record of publications, patents, open-source contributions, or engagement with communities such as NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, KDD, SIGIR, or RecSys.

Assistance For Individuals With Disabilities

Wayfair is fully committed to providing equal opportunities for all individuals, including individuals with disabilities. As part of this commitment, Wayfair will make reasonable accommodations to the known physical or mental limitations of qualified individuals with disabilities, unless doing so would impose an undue hardship on business operations. If you require a reasonable accommodation to participate in the job application or interview process, please let us know by completing our Accomodations for Applicants form.

About Wayfair Inc.

Wayfair is one of the world’s largest online destinations for the home. Whether you work in our global headquarters in Boston, or in our warehouses or offices throughout the world, we’re reinventing the way people shop for their homes. Through our commitment to industry-leading technology and creative problem-solving, we are confident that Wayfair will be home to the most rewarding work of your career. If you’re looking for rapid growth, constant learning, and dynamic challenges, then you’ll find that amazing career opportunities are knocking.

No matter who you are, Wayfair is a place you can call home. We’re a community of innovators, risk-takers, and trailblazers who celebrate our differences, and know that our unique perspectives make us stronger, smarter, and well-positioned for success. We value and rely on the collective voices of our employees, customers, community, and suppliers to help guide us as we build a better Wayfair – and world – for all. Every voice, every perspective matters. That’s why we’re proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, ethnicity, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship status, marital status, disability, gender identity, gender expression, veteran status, genetic information, or any other legally protected characteristic.

Your personal data is processed in accordance with our Candidate Privacy Notice (https://www.wayfair.com/careers/privacy). If you have any questions or wish to exercise your rights under applicable privacy and data protection laws, please contact us at [e-mail].