Senior Data Scientist

Dotdash Meredith; United States; Hybrid; USD 160,000 - 190,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Remote work flexibility

Office in NYC (3 days in office)

Job summary

People Inc. is seeking a Senior Data Scientist focused on personalization to own the recommendation engine that powers a personalized product feed. You will design, build, and evaluate models using live signals and a large catalog, from prototype to production within the current MLOps stack.

You will lead offline and online experiments, manage cold-start challenges, and collaborate with data engineering and product teams to deliver high-quality, scalable recommendations for millions of users.

Qualifications

• Master's degree or higher in computer science, statistics, machine learning, applied mathematics, or a related quantitative field.
• Strong data science fundamentals: statistics, experimental design, evaluation methodology.
• Experience designing, training, and deploying embedding models and vector retrieval.
• Direct experience with cold-start, sparse-signal personalization, and production ML.
• Strong Python and modern ML frameworks; production-quality code.
• Strong SQL in cloud data warehouses (BigQuery).

Responsibilities

• Own the design and development of core recommendation models for personalized feeds across multi-signal attributes.
• Define and run offline and online evaluation, experiments (A/B/multi-variant), and translate results to business decisions.
• Turn product catalog signals into meaningful model features; NLP/vision techniques to extract attributes.
• Take models from prototype to production within the existing MLOps stack (feature store, training, serving, monitoring).

Skills

Python

ML frameworks

SQL

A/B testing

Experimentation

NLP

Computer Vision

Production ML

Model deployment

Education

Master's degree or higher in CS/Statistics/ML/Applied Math

Tools

BigQuery

Milvus/Pinecone/Vertex AI Vector Search

GCP Vertex AI

PyTorch/TensorFlow/JAX

Job description

Senior Data Scientist

Job Description

About The Position

As a Senior Data Scientist for personalization, you will own the science behind the recommendation engine that powers each user's personalized product feed. Starting from our user-saved product signals and a live catalog ingested from thousands of retailer feeds, you will design, build, evaluate, and continuously improve the models that learn each user's taste across brand, category, color, price point, and fit.

This is a hands-on, full-cycle role. You will take a recommendation problem from raw data all the way to a production model running on our existing MLOps stack - you own the model layer, not the infrastructure. Our platform team already operates the feature store, serving, and autoscaling; your job is to decide what to model, prove it works through rigorous offline and online experimentation, ship it, and iterate as behavioral signals accumulate.

A defining challenge of this role is cold-start. We are launching with a small behavioral dataset and a catalog scaling from hundreds of thousands of products toward tens of millions. You will need strong commerce and product-data intuition to produce high-quality recommendations before rich click data exists - and the experimental discipline to keep improving them as it arrives. This is a foundational hire that will shape how millions of users discover products they love.

Remote or Hybrid 3x a weekNYC

In-office Expectations: This position offers remote work flexibility; however, if you reside within a commutable distance our offices in New York, the expectation is to work from the office three days per week.

About The Team

Our next-generation product discovery platform connects shoppers with the things they love across thousands of retail partners. Users save, organize, and share products they're excited about - and our platform turns those signals into a deeply personalized shopping experience. We ingest live product feeds from thousands of retailers and use a rich understanding of each user's taste to surface the right product at the right moment.

We're building the recommendation engine at the heart of this shopping experience - a system that understands not just what people save, but why they save it. This is a foundational hire that will shape how millions of users discover products they love.

About The Positions Contributions

• 35% Recommendation & Personalization Modeling Own the design and development of the core recommendation models that turn user-saved product data into a personalized feed. Develop multi-signal models spanning brand affinity, category, color/visual attributes, fit and sizing, price sensitivity, and trend. Select and justify approaches across collaborative filtering, matrix factorization, content-based, and hybrid/neural methods (e.g., two-tower and other embedding models), and know when each applies. Build product and user embeddings that capture semantic similarity across the catalog and power candidate generation and retrieval. Design cold-start strategies that produce high-quality recommendations for new users and newly ingested products with little or no behavioral history.
• 25% Experimentation & Measurement Define what "good" personalization means and how it is measured. Establish rigorous offline evaluation (ranking and relevance metrics, sound holdout design) and connect it to online outcomes. Design, run, and read out A/B and multivariate experiments, and translate results into clear product and business decisions. Bring statistical discipline - sound experiment design, awareness of bias and confounding, and honest interpretation - so the team can trust which changes actually move engagement.
• 20% Data, Signals & Feature Understanding Develop deep intuition for Picksy's product catalog and user signals. Turn implicit behavior (saves, clicks, dwell, shares) and catalog attributes into meaningful model features, writing SQL against BigQuery to pull, join, and shape raw data into training/evaluation datasets. Apply NLP and computer-vision techniques - including modern embedding and LLM-based approaches - to extract structured attributes (category, color, material, fit) from unstructured product descriptions and imagery, and to enrich sparse catalog data. Partner with data engineering on data quality, freshness, and coverage as the catalog scales from hundreds of thousands toward tens of millions of products.
• 20% Full-Cycle Ownership & Productionization Take models from prototype to production yourself. Write clean, production-quality code and deploy into the existing MLOps pipeline (feature store, training, serving, monitoring) rather than building infrastructure from scratch. Own model performance in production: instrument it, watch for drift and degradation, and iterate as behavioral signals accumulate. Document models, features, and decisions clearly, and collaborate closely with the MLOps, engineering, and product teams to integrate the model layer into the live product.

Education

Master's degree or higher in Computer Science, Statistics, Machine Learning, Applied Mathematics, or a related quantitative field; or equivalent practical experience.

Experience

You combine the modeling depth of an applied/data scientist with the pragmatism to ship end-to-end. You bring:

• Strong data science fundamentals: statistics, experimental design, and evaluation methodology, with the analytical ability to turn model results into clear product and business decisions.
• Demonstrated ownership of the full A/B testing lifecycle: designing experiments, running them, reading them out, and deciding; not just reporting offline metrics.
• Experience designing, training, and deploying embedding models and vector retrieval (e.g., Milvus, Pinecone, or Vertex AI Vector Search) for product or content similarity at catalog scale.
• Direct experience with cold-start / sparse-signal personalization: building useful recommendations from a new catalog, new users, or both. This is a core, day-one challenge of the role.
• Strong Python and modern ML frameworks (PyTorch, TensorFlow, or JAX) plus the standard scientific stack (pandas, NumPy, scikit-learn). You write production-quality code, not just notebooks.
• Strong SQL: hands-on experience querying large datasets in a cloud data warehouse (BigQuery preferred) to pull, join, and assemble the training and evaluation datasets that feed your models. This is a daily part of the role.
• Experience deploying and serving models on a cloud ML platform: GCP Vertex AI strongly preferred (SageMaker or equivalent acceptable) and you are comfortable owning the full model lifecycle: training, deployment, versioning, and monitoring.
• Commerce intuition: you've worked with product catalogs and understand merchandising, category, and PM concerns. It shows up in how you talk about catalogs and taste, not just models.
• Curiosity and pragmatism about emerging AI, particularly LLMs and modern retrieval/ranking, with a track record of bringing new techniques into real production use.
• Strong written and verbal communication: able to explain technical tradeoffs to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Nice to have

• Applied NLP and/or computer vision for extracting structured attributes from product text and imagery.
• Experience with adaptive recommendation and experimentation methods; multi-armed or contextual bandits.
• Public writing or conference talks on recommendation, personalization, or ranking work.
• Early-stage or commerce experience where you wore multiple hats and shipped against real business metrics (e.g., commerce SaaS or a vertical commerce startup).

Pay Range

Salary: New York: $175,000 - $190,000 Remote US: $160,000 - $175,000

The pay range above represents the anticipated low and high end of the pay range for this position and may change in the future. Actual pay may vary and may be above or below the range based on various factors including but not limited to work location, experience, and performance. The range listed is just one component of People Inc's total compensation package for employees. Other compensation may include annual bonuses, and short- and long-term incentives. In addition, People Inc. provides to employees (and their eligible family members) a variety of benefits, including medical, dental, vision, prescription drug coverage, unlimited paid time off (PTO), adoption or surrogate assistance, donation matching, tuition reimbursement, basic life insurance, basic accidental death & dismemberment, supplemental life insurance, supplemental accident insurance, commuter benefits, short term and long term disability, health savings and flexible spending accounts, family care benefits, a generous 401K savings plan with a company match program, 10-12 paid holidays annually, and generous paid parental leave (birthing and non-birthing parents), all of which may vary depending on the specific nature of your employment with People Inc. and your work location. We also offer voluntary benefits such as pet insurance, accident, critical and hospital indemnity health insurance coverage, life and disability insurance.

It is the policy of People Inc. to provide equal employment opportunity (EEO) to all persons regardless of age, color, national origin, citizenship status, physical or mental disability, race, religion, creed, gender, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity and/or expression, genetic information, marital status, status with regard to public assistance, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local law. In addition, the Company will provide reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities. Accommodation requests can be made by emailing [e-mail].

The Company participates in the federal E-Verify program to confirm the identity and employment authorization of all newly hired employees. For further information about the E-Verify program, click here: https://www.e-verify.gov/employees

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