Staff Data Scientist — Remote NLP & Search Leader

United States Digital Space LLC; United States; Remote; USD 200,000 - 244,000; Full time

Job summary

DuckDuckGo is seeking an accomplished Senior Data Scientist to lead high-complexity projects from scoping to production. You will shape signals for ranking, apply NLP techniques, and explore LLM-enabled features to improve search relevance while maintaining privacy.

This role emphasizes ownership, cross-functional collaboration, and end-to-end delivery. Ideal candidates have 10+ years in data science, with leadership experience at Staff/Principal/Director level, and strong Python/SQL

Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience in Data Science, with 2+ years at Staff, Principal, or Director level.
• Hands-on deploying ML in production, developing NLP solutions, and AI-assisted development.
• Production-grade Python or a comparable language; advanced SQL skills.

Responsibilities

• Drive product and business impact by improving search engine ranking and results.
• Develop and evaluate new lexical-matching and document-authority signals.
• Expand evaluations to measure relevancy readiness and surface ranking blindspots.
• Investigate LLMs for feature generation and ranking.

Skills

Python

SQL

Production ML

NLP

AI systems

Technical leadership

Education

Master's or PhD in Data Science

Tools

Vespa

Elasticsearch

OpenSearch

Solr

Job description

DuckDuckGo is seeking an accomplished Senior Data Scientist to lead high-complexity projects from scoping to production. You will shape signals for ranking, apply NLP techniques, and explore LLM-enabled features to improve search relevance while maintaining privacy.

This role emphasizes ownership, cross-functional collaboration, and end-to-end delivery. Ideal candidates have 10+ years in data science, with leadership experience at Staff/Principal/Director level, and strong Python/SQL