Senior Data Science Leader — Personalization & Strategy

Nordstrom; Seattle (WA); Hybrid; USD 191,000 - 297,000; Full time

Job summary

Nordstrom is seeking a Senior Manager of Data Science to lead a team of data scientists and ML engineers, focused on improving how customers discover and shop across digital experiences. You will shape strategy across personalization, recommendations, search and browse relevance, and measurement.

This role blends hands‑on leadership with building reusable capabilities, driving experimentation, and applying GenAI to accelerate research and decisioning.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of hands‑on experience in Data Science or Machine Learning roles.
• 3+ years managing Data Science, Applied Science, or ML teams for customer‑facing products.
• Bachelor’s degree in a quantitative field; advanced degree preferred.

Responsibilities

• Set the data science strategy for personalization, recommendations, search, browse, and digital product discovery.
• Partner with Product, Engineering, UX, and business leaders to identify high‑value customer problems before selecting solutions.
• Establish hypotheses, success measures, targets, guardrails, and decision criteria before significant experimentation.
• Move beyond model comparisons to understanding why customer behavior changed and the value created.
• Build a strong experimentation and measurement discipline linking model performance to customer behavior and business outcomes.
• Develop team capabilities in experimentation, causal reasoning, optimization, and ranking.
• Identify repetitive data science work and turn into reusable capabilities.
• Leverage GenAI and AI capabilities to speed research, experimentation, evaluation, and learning.

Skills

Data science leadership

Team management

Experimentation & causal inference

Product & business judgment

Communication

GenAI awareness

Education

Bachelor's degree in a quantitative field

Advanced degree preferred

Tools

Python

SQL

BigQuery

Hugging Face

OpenRouter

Google Vertex AI

AWS

Job description

Nordstrom is seeking a Senior Manager of Data Science to lead a team of data scientists and ML engineers, focused on improving how customers discover and shop across digital experiences. You will shape strategy across personalization, recommendations, search and browse relevance, and measurement.

This role blends hands‑on leadership with building reusable capabilities, driving experimentation, and applying GenAI to accelerate research and decisioning.