VP of AI Search & Recommendations

Realtor.com; Austin (TX); On-site; USD 150,000 - 200,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading real estate platform seeks a VP of Engineering to enhance the search and discovery experience. You will oversee search systems, drive machine learning initiatives, and lead a multidisciplinary team on-site in Austin. Required are extensive leadership skills in large-scale systems and a strong background in AI integration. This role offers the chance to make significant impacts on the company’s customer engagement and business metrics.

Qualifications

• 12+ years experience in large-scale search/recommendation systems.
• Hands-on leadership integrating machine learning for improved outcomes.
• Ability to build and scale multi-disciplinary teams.

Responsibilities

• Lead core search operations including indexing and retrieval.
• Drive advancements in ranking and relevance science.
• Own personalization features and evaluation metrics.

Skills

Leadership in search/recommendation systems

Machine Learning and AI integration

Real-time inference and operations

Executive communication and alignment

People and organizational leadership

Job description

Overview

Join Realtor.com to help make the search & discovery experience the most trusted, relevant, and fastest path to the right home at public-company scale. As VP of Engineering, Search & Discovery, you’ll lead a multidisciplinary organization across Search Engineering, Relevance/Ranking, Query Understanding, Personalization, and ML Platforms, partnering with Product, Data, and Revenue to move the company’s key customer and business metrics. This is a hands-on VP role: you’ll define strategy, shape architecture, hire and develop leaders, and maintain a high bar for execution, reliability, and measurable outcomes.

The Opportunity

Search is the front door to Realtor.com. Your mandate is to make our search and discovery experience the most trusted, most relevant, and fastest path to the right home.

What You’ll Bring

• Proven scale: led search/recommendation systems serving tens of millions of users or equivalent high-stakes marketplaces, with measurable lifts in relevance and revenue.
• Depth in search & ML: 12+ years in large-scale search/recommendation, including hybrid retrieval, learning-to-rank, user modeling, and evaluation. Experience shipping multi-objective ranking in production.
• GenAI pragmatism: hands-on leadership integrating LLMs where they improve outcomes (e.g., re-ranking, query reformulation, answer synthesis) with strong offline/online evaluation discipline.
• Platform and operations chops: real-time inference, feature stores, streaming data, strong SRE partnership; design for latency, reliability, and cost.
• People & org leadership: built and scaled multi-disciplinary teams; hired/developed Directors and Principals; set culture, strategy, and execution cadence.
• Executive communication: clear storyteller; align product, design, science, finance, legal, and revenue stakeholders on trade-offs and timelines.
• Austin presence: willing and able to work onsite at our Austin HQ (relocation may be required).

What You’ll Own

• Core Search: indexing, retrieval, query understanding.
• Ranking & Relevance Science: features, models, re-ranking, guardrails.
• Personalization: session/user modeling, eligibility, privacy-aware features.
• Evaluation & Experimentation: offline/online, human-in-the-loop; continuous improvements with safety rails.
• ML/Inference Platform for search use-cases: latency-critical APIs, feature store.
• Quality & Integrity: spam/fraud/abuse defenses; content quality signals.

12-month Outcomes that Define Success

• Quality: meaningful gains in nDCG/ERR and conversion/lead quality; improved first-result time and P95 latency.
• Velocity: 2–3× increase in experiment throughput; reliable weekly relevance drops with automated evaluation.
• Platform: real-time re-ranking and feature pipeline; safe & measurable GenAI integrations where outperform baselines.
• Organizational health: fully staffed leadership bench; clear succession and hiring plan; strong engagement and retention.
• Operational excellence: met SLOs, strong incident posture, and a favorable cost curve.

Equal Opportunity & Culture

Realtor.com is an Equal Opportunity Employer regardless of age, color, national origin, race, religion, creed, gender, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity and/or expression, marital status, disability, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law. Realtor.com provides reasonable accommodations for otherwise qualified disabled individuals. Diversity is important to us and is reflected in our culture.

Do the best work of your life at Realtor.com. You’ll partner with a diverse team of experts, use leading-edge tech, empower consumers to find their way home, and grow in a warm, inclusive culture with opportunities to develop.