Lead Applied Data Scientist – Search & NLP at Scale

Target; Sunnyvale (CA); Hybrid; USD 132,000 - 286,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health benefits

401(k)

Paid time off

Job summary

Target in Sunnyvale, CA is seeking a Lead Data Scientist – Search and Browse to design and deploy scalable ML systems that power Target’s digital experiences. You will lead NLP, LLM, and AI initiatives, build large-scale data pipelines, and mentor engineers while collaborating with product and business teams in a hybrid work model.

PhD or MS in relevant field and 5+ years of production ML experience are expected.

Qualifications

• PhD or MS in Computer Science, Applied Mathematics, Statistics, Physics or equivalent work or industry experience.
• Research or industry experiences in search indexing, information retrieval or ranking.
• Demonstrated experience in NLP, LLMs, agentic systems or recommendation systems at scale.
• 5+ years of experience in deploying machine learning algorithms into production environments with good ML Ops experience.
• Proficient in Python or Java with excellent coding and problem-solving skills.

Responsibilities

• Develop and deploy scalable deep learning models to improve the search experience of guests.
• Use LLM and agentic technologies to improve ecommerce search experience.
• Architect and implement large-scale AI systems using test-driven development practices.
• Build NLP technology for query and document analysis, processing, and understanding.
• Create data pipelines for feature/label extraction and generation.
• Conduct data analysis to identify opportunities and improve models.
• Conduct research to advance the state-of-the-art ML, LLM, and NLP technologies.
• Contributing to the operations/building of AI pipelines.
• Adopting Target's infrastructural platforms and operationalize tools and systems around them.
• Mentor and partner with other engineers to develop software that meets business needs.
• Collaborate effectively with product and business partners to define and scope solutions
• Follow agile methodology for software development and technical documentation
• Innovate constantly and keep systems up to date with current technologies

Skills

Python

Java

Machine Learning

NLP

ML Ops

SQL

Leadership

Research

Education

PhD or MS in Computer Science / related field

Job description

Target in Sunnyvale, CA is seeking a Lead Data Scientist – Search and Browse to design and deploy scalable ML systems that power Target’s digital experiences. You will lead NLP, LLM, and AI initiatives, build large-scale data pipelines, and mentor engineers while collaborating with product and business teams in a hybrid work model.

PhD or MS in relevant field and 5+ years of production ML experience are expected.