Principal Data Scientist – Consumer

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in United States.

📋 Description

• Act as the technical lead for Gopuff's consumer personalization initiatives.

• Establish modeling strategies for recommendations, ranking, and personalization across various platforms including the home feed, search, product pages, cart, and CRM.

• Develop systems for candidate generation, retrieval, and learning-to-rank that balance relevance, basket size, margin, and real-time inventory.

• Create LLM-driven agentic AI experiences that assist customers in planning, discovering, and reordering products.

• Integrate traditional machine learning techniques and LLMs into production systems.

• Design A/B tests and offline evaluation frameworks, select relevant metrics, and link model improvements to customer and business outcomes.

• Collaborate with engineering and product managers on feature pipelines, model deployment, latency budgets, and monitoring processes.

• Guide senior and staff data scientists, lead design reviews, and elevate standards for modeling, code quality, and measurement practices.

• Work closely with Product and Engineering leaders to prioritize impactful challenges and communicate trade-offs to executives.

⛳️ Requirements

• Over 10 years of experience in data science or machine learning, or over 8 years with a PhD in a quantitative discipline (such as computer science, statistics, operations research, or a related field).

• Proven history of delivering recommendation, ranking, or personalization systems that positively influenced consumer metrics at scale.

• Extensive knowledge of classic machine learning techniques: gradient boosting, collaborative filtering, matrix factorization, learning-to-rank, embeddings, and causal and experimental methodologies.

• Practical experience in developing agentic AI systems utilizing LLMs, including prompt and tool design, retrieval-augmented generation, multi-step agents, and assessing agent quality and safety.

• Proficient in Python with expertise in pandas, scikit-learn, XGBoost or LightGBM, and either PyTorch or TensorFlow.

• Strong SQL skills with experience in managing large data warehouses; hands-on familiarity with Snowflake.

• Comfortable using AI coding assistants like Claude, with the ability to review, test, and validate AI-generated code while ensuring customer data protection.

• Solid foundation in A/B testing, aligning offline and online metrics, and statistical inference.

• Experience in guiding technical direction across teams without direct authority and mentoring senior data scientists.

• Ability to communicate effectively with both technical and non-technical stakeholders, including executives.

• Preferred: Familiarity with Databricks or similar platforms, experience in e-commerce/grocery/quick-commerce or marketplace environments, knowledge of real-time or session-based recommendations, contextual bandits or reinforcement learning, agent frameworks, and LLM evaluation tools, model fine-tuning or distillation, dbt, Airflow, and any relevant publications, patents, or open-source contributions.

🏝️ Benefits

• Medical/Dental/Vision Insurance

• 401(k) Retirement Savings Plan

• HSA or FSA eligibility

• Long and Short-Term Disability Insurance

• Fitness Reimbursement Program

• 25% employee discount & FAM Membership

• Flexible PTO

• Group Life Insurance

• EAP through AllOne Health (formerly Carebridge)

• Discretionary annual cash bonus

• Participation in Gopuff’s equity incentive plan