Senior Data Scientist — Personalization & Relevance (Hybrid)

Nordstrom, Inc.; Seattle (WA); Hybrid; USD 166,000 - 258,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical/Vision

Dental

Retirement Plan

PTO

Life Insurance

Disability Insurance

Merchandise Discount

401k

Job summary

Nordstrom, Inc. is seeking a Senior Data Scientist to advance personalization, recommendations, search, and browse relevance across our digital shopping experience.

The role blends deep machine learning with experimentation and customer understanding to improve how we match customers with relevant products and experiences. This hybrid Seattle-based position requires in-office work at Nordstrom Seattle for a minimum of 4 days per week.

Qualifications

• Minimum of 6+ years of hands-on experience in Data Science or Machine Learning roles.
• Bachelor's degree in a quantitative field; advanced degree preferred.
• Deep experience with recommendation systems, ranking, personalization, search, or information retrieval.
• Strong knowledge of machine learning, deep learning, experimentation, and statistical evaluation.
• Experience with embeddings, neural ranking, transformers, or related modern ML techniques, including adapting existing open‑source and pre‑trained models.
• Strong Python and SQL skills, including working with large‑scale data (BigQuery).
• Experience using AI tools (Claude Code) in your daily workflow and applying LLM or agentic approaches to real problems.
• Familiarity with cloud ML platforms such as Google Vertex AI or AWS machine learning pipelines is a plus.
• Experience moving models from research through production evaluation.
• Ability to reason about customer and business outcomes beyond offline model metrics.
• Experience working closely with Product and Engineering, including framing the right problem and defining outcome metrics with business partners.
• Strong technical communication and mentorship skills.

Responsibilities

• Develop and improve recommendation, ranking, relevance, and personalization approaches.
• Build deeper representations of customer intent, product understanding, and shopping context.
• Evaluate and apply modern ML approaches, leveraging open-source and pre-trained resources (e.g., Hugging Face).
• Design offline evaluation frameworks that predict online customer outcomes.
• Partner with Product and Engineering to define problems, outcomes, and success metrics.
• Design and analyze online experiments to understand impact of relevance and personalization approaches.
• Investigate differential effects across customer cohorts, product categories, and shopping contexts.
• Help connect candidate generation, ranking, customer understanding, product understanding, and feedback signals into a cohesive personalization system.
• Develop reusable evaluation, feature, and modeling approaches across surfaces.
• Use AI-assisted development tools in daily workflow and bring agentic/LLM approaches into personalization decisioning.
• Mentor scientists and establish strong technical practices.

Skills

Data Science

Machine Learning

Experimentation

Mentorship

Python

SQL

Communication

Education

Bachelor's degree in quantitative field

Tools

Hugging Face

Claude Code

BigQuery

Vertex AI

AWS ML Pipelines

Job description

Nordstrom, Inc. is seeking a Senior Data Scientist to advance personalization, recommendations, search, and browse relevance across our digital shopping experience.

The role blends deep machine learning with experimentation and customer understanding to improve how we match customers with relevant products and experiences. This hybrid Seattle-based position requires in-office work at Nordstrom Seattle for a minimum of 4 days per week.