Lead Data Scientist: Relevance & Personalization

84.51˚; Chicago (IL); On-site; USD 125,000 - 207,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

401(k) with matching

Paid time off

Job summary

84.51° in Chicago is seeking a Lead Data Scientist to guide the Relevancy Sciences team, shaping search and recommender systems with modern model architectures.

You will mentor data scientists, collaborate with product and engineering, and drive production ML that touches millions of Kroger customers while focusing on scalable, real-time inference and rigorous evaluation. The role emphasizes cutting-edge AI techniques and responsible deployment.

Qualifications

• 6+ years of applied ML with explicit 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.
• Experience shipping ML systems that improved business metrics.
• Experience with evaluating LLM- and agent-based systems (e.g., RAG) and real-time deployment.

Responsibilities

• Own and drive technical initiatives across search & recommender systems, defining the science strategy.
• Develop ML solutions tailored to grocery retail, improving product discovery and personalization.
• Evaluate ML performance with rigorous online/offline methods and experiments.
• Partner with Engineering to deploy production‑ready ML systems for real-time inference and monitoring.
• Drive cross‑functional alignment with Product and Business stakeholders.
• Mentor data scientists and promote reproducibility and a strong technical culture.

Skills

Python

SQL

Machine learning

Recommender systems

Search systems

Experimentation & A/B testing

LLM / agent-based systems

Production ML systems

Cloud platforms (GCP/Azur​e)

Education

Bachelor's / Master's / PhD in CS or quantitative field

Tools

Spark

Python

Job description

84.51° in Chicago is seeking a Lead Data Scientist to guide the Relevancy Sciences team, shaping search and recommender systems with modern model architectures.

You will mentor data scientists, collaborate with product and engineering, and drive production ML that touches millions of Kroger customers while focusing on scalable, real-time inference and rigorous evaluation. The role emphasizes cutting-edge AI techniques and responsible deployment.