Lead Data Scientist, Personalization & Agentic AI

Lever, Inc.; Philadelphia (Philadelphia County); Remote; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Healthcare

401(k) retirement

HSA/FSA eligible

Disability insurance

Fitness reimbursement

Employee discount

Flexible PTO

Life Insurance

Employee Assistance Program

Job summary

Gopuff is seeking a Principal Data Scientist, Consumer, to lead personalization, recommendations, and agentic AI experiences across search, home feed, and cart. You will design end-to-end models, mentor senior data scientists, and partner with Product, Engineering, and Marketing to scale impact.

You will balance traditional ML with LLM approaches, run A/B tests, and ensure production quality, latency budgets, and guardrails, driving measurable business outcomes for our customers.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience in data science or machine learning, or 8+ years with a PhD in a quantitative field.
• A track record of shipping recommendation, ranking, or personalization systems that measurably moved consumer metrics at scale.
• Deep knowledge of classic machine learning: gradient boosting, collaborative filtering, matrix factorization, learning-to-rank, embeddings, and causal and experimental methods.
• Hands-on experience building agentic AI systems with LLMs, including prompt and tool design, retrieval-augmented generation, multi-step agents, and evaluation of agent quality and safety.
• Expert Python skills and fluency with the core ML stack (for example pandas, scikit-learn, XGBoost or LightGBM, PyTorch or TensorFlow).
• Strong SQL and experience working with large data warehouses; hands-on experience with Snowflake.
• Comfortable using AI coding assistants such as Claude to build models and pipelines faster, with the judgment to review, test, and validate AI-generated code and to protect customer data.
• Solid grounding in A/B testing, offline-to-online metric alignment, and statistical inference.
• Experience leading technical direction across teams without direct authority, and mentoring senior data scientists.
• Clear communication with both technical and non-technical partners, including executives.

Responsibilities

• Own consumer personalization end to end. Define the modeling strategy for recommendations, ranking, and personalization across the home feed, search, product pages, cart, and CRM.
• Build recommenders and rankers. Design candidate generation, retrieval, and learning-to-rank systems that balance relevance, basket size, margin, and real-time inventory availability.
• Lead agentic AI for consumers. Build LLM-powered agents that help customers plan, discover, and reorder, including tool use, retrieval, evaluation, and guardrails.
• Blend classic ML and LLMs. Decide when a gradient-boosted model, a two-tower network, or an LLM is the right tool, and combine them in production systems.
• Run rigorous experiments. Design A/B tests and offline evaluation frameworks, choose the right metrics, and connect model gains to customer and business outcomes.
• Ship to production. Partner with engineers and product managers on feature pipelines, model serving, latency budgets, and monitoring for drift and quality.
• Set the bar. Mentor senior and staff data scientists, lead design reviews, and raise standards for modeling, code quality, and measurement across the team.
• Shape the roadmap. Work with Product and Engineering leaders to choose the problems with the highest impact and explain trade-offs clearly to executives.

Skills

Data science experience

Machine learning

Python

SQL

A/B testing

Mentoring

Executive communication

Recommender systems

Learning to rank

LLMs

Production ML

Pandas

scikit-learn

PyTorch/TensorFlow

Snowflake

Big data

Experiment design

Education

PhD in quantitative field

Tools

Databricks

Spark

MLflow

Feature stores

dbt

Airflow

Job description

Gopuff is seeking a Principal Data Scientist, Consumer, to lead personalization, recommendations, and agentic AI experiences across search, home feed, and cart. You will design end-to-end models, mentor senior data scientists, and partner with Product, Engineering, and Marketing to scale impact.

You will balance traditional ML with LLM approaches, run A/B tests, and ensure production quality, latency budgets, and guardrails, driving measurable business outcomes for our customers.