Lead Data Scientist – Personalization & Search

84.51; Cincinnati (OH); On-site; USD 125,000 - 207,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, Dental, Vision

401(k) with Roth and matching

Paid time off

Health Savings Account with matching

Family leave

Job summary

84.51 is seeking a Lead Data Scientist to empower relevant, personalized experiences across Kroger’s e‑commerce ecosystem. You will guide search and recommender systems at scale, shaping multi‑stage pipelines and production ML.

Join a team that blends deep ML expertise with systems thinking, mentoring junior data scientists and collaborating with product and engineering to deliver measurable business impact.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s, Master’s, or PhD in Computer Science, Data Science, Statistics, Mathematics, Engineering, or related quantitative field.
• 6+ years of applied ML with search and/or recommendation systems experience.
• Experience designing and building systems at scale — including retrieval and ranking with multi‑stage pipelines.
• Proficient in Python and SQL, with experience processing large‑scale data in distributed environments (e.g., Spark).
• Track record of shipping ML systems that moved business or customer metrics at scale.
• Strong foundation in statistics, experimentation, and data analysis, including A/B testing.
• Hands‑on experience building or evaluating LLM‑ and agent‑based systems (e.g., RAG, agentic workflows).
• Experience partnering with engineering teams to deploy and maintain ML systems in production.
• Understanding of real‑time systems, model serving, feature pipelines, and monitoring.
• Ability to balance model complexity, performance, latency, and scalability.
• Demonstrated ability to lead technical work across projects and influence across teams.
• Experience mentoring or guiding other data scientists and building a strong technical culture.
• Experience with cloud platforms such as GCP or Azure.
• Experience in retail, e‑commerce, or high‑scale consumer domains is a plus.

Responsibilities

• Own and drive technical initiatives across search & recommender systems; define and evolve the science strategy for content discovery, relevance, personalization, and decisions.
• Rapidly prototype and validate new ideas to accelerate adoption and demonstrate measurable value.
• Design ML solutions tailored to grocery retail; lead systems that improve product discovery and personalization across customer journeys; explore Generative AI and agent‑based approaches.
• Establish robust evaluation methodologies to assess ML systems; define online evaluation frameworks and guide experimentation strategies.
• Partner with Engineering to build and deploy production‑ready ML systems with real‑time inference, monitoring, and scalability.
• Translate needs into clear problem statements, hypotheses, and execution plans; drive alignment across teams.
• Mentor data scientists; lead technical reviews to improve rigor and foster a learning culture.

Skills

Python

SQL

Spark

Machine Learning

LLM / Agent-based systems

Experimentation & A/B testing

Production ML systems

Cross-functional collaboration

Leadership / mentoring

Communication

Education

Bachelor’s/Master’s/PhD in Computer Science/Data Science/Statistics

Tools

Spark

Python

SQL

GCP/Azure

Job description

84.51 is seeking a Lead Data Scientist to empower relevant, personalized experiences across Kroger’s e‑commerce ecosystem. You will guide search and recommender systems at scale, shaping multi‑stage pipelines and production ML.

Join a team that blends deep ML expertise with systems thinking, mentoring junior data scientists and collaborating with product and engineering to deliver measurable business impact.