Lead Applied Scientist, Search & Information Retrieval

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in United States, +2 more locations.

📋 Description

• Take charge of the design, development, and deployment of large-scale search and information retrieval systems.

• Collaborate across various retrieval architectures, indexing pipelines, ranking and re-ranking systems, semantic retrieval, hybrid search, and retrieval optimization.

• Construct and refine ingestion pipelines that analyze, enrich, and prepare documents for retrieval.

• Create ranking and re-ranking systems utilizing both traditional information retrieval techniques and modern LLM-based methods.

• Enhance retrieval quality through semantic retrieval, hybrid retrieval, query understanding, and relevance optimization.

• Develop evaluation frameworks to assess retrieval performance, relevance, ranking quality, and end-user outcomes.

• Guide technical decisions concerning indexing strategies, retrieval architectures, ranking models, and search infrastructure.

• Collaborate with engineering teams to provide scalable, reliable, and high-performance search services.

• Contribute to the advancement of self-service search platform capabilities utilized by internal product teams.

• Offer technical insights to senior leadership regarding search, retrieval, and AI strategy.

• Mentor applied scientists and machine learning practitioners throughout the organization.

⛳️ Requirements

• A PhD in Computer Science, Information Retrieval, AI, Machine Learning, NLP, or a related discipline is preferred.

• Over 8 years of industry experience in developing production search, information retrieval, ranking, or recommendation systems.

• Publications in conferences such as SIGIR, ACL, EMNLP, NeurIPS, ICLR, KDD, WWW, or equivalent venues.

• Proficient in production Python with experience in PyTorch, Hugging Face Transformers, and distributed model development.

• Extensive hands-on experience in search engine architecture, indexing systems, and ingestion pipelines.

• Expertise in ranking and re-ranking systems, rather than merely utilizing search technologies.

• Familiarity with information retrieval, semantic retrieval, hybrid retrieval, and vector search architectures.

• Knowledge in query understanding, relevance optimization, and search evaluation methodologies.

• Experience with retrieval systems that support large collections of text-rich content.

• Proficiency in LLM-enhanced retrieval, RAG architectures, and retrieval optimization.

• Capable of end-to-end measurement and evaluation of search quality and user outcomes.

🏝️ Benefits

• Flex My Way is a comprehensive set of supportive workplace policies aimed at helping balance personal and professional responsibilities.

• Flexible work arrangements, allowing work from anywhere for up to 8 weeks per year.

• Comprehensive benefit plans that include flexible vacation options.

• Two company-wide Mental Health Days off annually.

• Access to the Headspace app for mindfulness and mental wellness.

• Retirement savings plans.

• Tuition reimbursement opportunities.

• Employee incentive programs.

• Resources dedicated to mental, physical, and financial wellbeing.

• Opportunities to make a meaningful impact in your community through our Social Impact Institute.

• Two paid volunteer days off each year.

• Options to engage in pro-bono consulting projects and Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) initiatives.

• Comprehensive health, dental, vision, disability, and life insurance coverage.

• Competitive 401k plan with company matching contributions.

• Market-leading work-life benefits, including competitive vacation, sick and safe paid time off, and paid holidays.

• Parental leave policies.

• Sabbatical leave options.

• Optional hospital, accident, and sickness insurance, fully funded by the employee.

• Optional life and AD&D insurance, fully funded by the employee.

• Flexible Spending and Health Savings Accounts.

• Fitness reimbursement programs.

• Access to an Employee Assistance Program.

• Group Legal Identity Theft Protection benefit, fully funded by the employee.

• Access to a 529 Plan for educational savings.

• Commuter benefits.

• Assistance for Adoption & Surrogacy.

• Tuition Reimbursement programs.

• Access to an Employee Stock Purchase Plan.