Principal Applied Scientist, Search & Discovery (Remote)

Material-Bank; Boston (MA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 230,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Flexible PTO

Sick Days

Paid national holidays

Health benefits

401(k) plan

Hybrid/remote working options

Job summary

Material Bank is seeking a Staff Applied Scientist to build search and discovery systems from the ground up. You will design, prototype, and ship ranking and recommendation models, collaborating with product and engineering to productionize the solutions.

The role emphasizes hands-on research with a focus on improving search quality, relevance, and user experience across our materials marketplace, using advanced NLP and retrieval techniques.

Qualifications

• Track record building search, recommendations, or ranking systems that shipped to real users.
• Deep understanding of search and recommendation systems, retrieval, ranking, and relevance.
• Strong query understanding and NLP, including semantic and embedding-based retrieval.
• Hands-on building ability; prototyping and implementing your ideas.
• Experience deploying ML or data systems to production is a plus.

Responsibilities

• Improve search retrieval and ranking to help members find what they need and discover new items.
• Build our recommendation systems from scratch with robust algorithms.
• Explore data to identify strategy and answer questions from behavior and catalog data.
• Apply advanced query understanding and semantic search to real-world queries.
• Raise data quality by identifying and fixing catalog issues that affect results.
• Develop and ship R&D work with the engineering teams to productionize.
• Iterate image-based search and color matching for improved relevance.
• Measure impact with evaluation frameworks and experiments as traffic grows.
• Collaborate with product, engineering, and catalog teams to ship improvements.

Skills

Search and ranking systems

NLP and query understanding

Hands-on prototyping

Production ML deployment experience

Education

Advanced degree in a quantitative field

Job description

Material Bank is seeking a Staff Applied Scientist to build search and discovery systems from the ground up. You will design, prototype, and ship ranking and recommendation models, collaborating with product and engineering to productionize the solutions.

The role emphasizes hands-on research with a focus on improving search quality, relevance, and user experience across our materials marketplace, using advanced NLP and retrieval techniques.