Staff Applied Scientist — Search & Recommendations

Material Bank®; United States; Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Flexible PTO

Health benefits

401(k) after 90 days

Growth opportunities

Hybrid work model

Job summary

Material Bank is seeking a Staff Applied Scientist to lead building search and recommendations from the ground up. This hands-on research role involves exploring data, formulating hypotheses, prototyping approaches, and partnering with engineering to productionize solutions.

You will design, tune, and evaluate retrieval/ranking, build robust recommender algorithms, and lead exploratory analysis to shape strategy while collaborating across product, engineering, and catalog teams.

Qualifications

• Track record shipping search/retrieval or ranking to real users.
• Advanced degree in CS/ML or equivalent hands-on experience.
• Deep understanding of search and recommendations: retrieval, ranking, relevance.
• Strong NLP including semantic/embedding-based retrieval.
• Experience with experimental design and statistical testing.

Responsibilities

• Improve search retrieval and ranking for relevant results.
• Build recommendation systems from the ground up.
• Explore data to drive strategy and hypotheses.
• Apply advanced query understanding and semantic parsing.
• Collaborate with product, engineering, and catalog teams.

Skills

Search systems

Recommender systems

NLP

Query understanding

Experiment design

Hands-on coding

Education

Advanced degree in CS/ML or related field

Tools

Python

SQL

Job description

Material Bank is seeking a Staff Applied Scientist to lead building search and recommendations from the ground up. This hands-on research role involves exploring data, formulating hypotheses, prototyping approaches, and partnering with engineering to productionize solutions.

You will design, tune, and evaluate retrieval/ranking, build robust recommender algorithms, and lead exploratory analysis to shape strategy while collaborating across product, engineering, and catalog teams.