Senior ML Scientist – Search & Personalization (Hybrid)

Roundel; Sunnyvale, Northern (CA, KY); Hybrid; USD 150,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Target is seeking a Senior Data Scientist for the Search team to advance ranking and personalization across digital experiences. You will develop scalable ML models, run offline and online experiments, and push state-of-the-art NLP, embeddings, and vector search techniques in large retail catalogs.

You’ll partner with product, engineering, and infrastructure to deliver high-impact solutions while balancing latency, scale, and reliability in production systems.

Qualifications

• PhD or MS in a quantitative field and 3+ years of ML/data science experience.
• Strong experience with retrieval/ranking, NLP, vector search or related ML domains.
• Proficient in Python and SQL, plus production ML system experience.

Responsibilities

• Develop and deploy scalable ML models for search ranking and browse personalization.
• Design offline/online experiments to improve relevance, engagement and conversions.
• Build feature pipelines, evaluation frameworks, and ML workflows for production.
• Collaborate with Product, Engineering and Infrastructure teams to align solutions.
• Balance model quality with latency, scalability, and reliability in large systems.

Skills

Python

SQL

Distributed data processing

NLP

Experiment design

Communication

Education

MS/PhD in CS/Statistics/Applied Math

Tools

Embeddings

Vector search

GenAI

Retrieval systems

Job description

Target is seeking a Senior Data Scientist for the Search team to advance ranking and personalization across digital experiences. You will develop scalable ML models, run offline and online experiments, and push state-of-the-art NLP, embeddings, and vector search techniques in large retail catalogs.

You’ll partner with product, engineering, and infrastructure to deliver high-impact solutions while balancing latency, scale, and reliability in production systems.