Lead Data Scientist, Relevancy Sciences Data Science & Research - Personalization & Loyalty Strategy (P3764)

Relevancy Sciences Team is responsible for powering relevant, personalized, and scalable customer experiences across Kroger's e-commerce ecosystem. We build and evolve the science behind search and recommendations that serve millions of customers and support high-scale digital experiences.

We are seeking a Lead Data Scientist to provide technical leadership across search and recommender systems, with a strong focus on modern model architectures, and production-ready machine learning. This role is ideal for someone who combines depth in applied machine learning with strong systems thinking, cross-functional influence, and contributes towards agentic capabilities.

What does the role entail? (Responsibilities)

Technical Leadership, Ownership, and Influence. Own and drive technical initiatives across search & recommender systems. Define and evolve the science strategy for improving content discovery, relevance, personalization, and decision support across digital experiences. Identify high-impact opportunities, make clear technical tradeoffs, and guide the team towards scalable, practical solutions. Rapidly prototype and validate new ideas to accelerate adoption and demonstrate measurable value.

Develop innovative search & recommender systems. Design and build ML solutions tailored to the unique needs of grocery retail domain. Lead the development of systems that improve product discovery and personalization across customer journeys. Bring strong technical and thought leadership on next generation personalization, including the use of Generative AI and agent-based approaches.

Evaluate and improve ML performance. Establish rigorous evaluation methodologies to assess the performance of ML systems across key metrics. Define robust online evaluation frameworks, and guide experimentation strategies that connect model improvements to customer and business outcomes.

Model serving and deployment. Partner closely with Engineering to build and deploy production-ready ML systems. Influence design decisions related to real-time inference, feature access, system integration, monitoring, and reliability. Ensure solutions meet latency, scalability, and operational requirements. Contribute to the evolution of serving and deployment strategies.

Cross-functional leadership. Work closely with Product, Engineering, and business stakeholders to translate needs into clear problem statements, hypotheses, and execution plans. Drive alignment across teams and influence decisions through clear communication of tradeoffs, risks, and expected outcomes.

Mentoring and knowledge sharing. Mentor data scientists and lead technical reviews to improve model quality, experimentation rigor, and systems thinking. Promote best practices in reproducibility and evaluation. Contribute to building a strong, learning-oriented team culture.

What skills and experience do you need? (Requirements)

• Bachelor's, Master's, or PhD in Computer Science, Data Science, Statistics, Mathematics, Engineering, or a related quantitative field.
• 6+ years of experience applying machine learning to real-world problems with strong experience in search and recommender systems. Strong understanding of approaches such as embeddings and multi-stage decision systems.
• Strong proficiency in Python and SQL, with experience working on large-scale data using tools such as Spark.
• Experience with modern machine learning and deep learning frameworks such as PyTorch or TensorFlow.
• Strong foundation in statistics, experimentation, and data analysis, including design of experiments and A/B testing.
• Familiarity with large language models, foundation models, and emerging AI capabilities, including where they are applicable and where they are not.
• Experience evaluating or prototyping GenAI-based solutions is preferred.
• Experience partnering with engineering teams to deploy and maintain machine learning systems in production.
• Understanding of real-time systems, model serving, feature pipelines, and monitoring.
• Ability to make practical tradeoffs between model complexity, performance, latency, and scalability.
• Demonstrated ability to lead technical work across projects and influence direction across data science, engineering, and product teams.
• Experience mentoring or guiding other data scientists and contributing to a strong technical culture.
• Experience working with cloud platforms such as GCP or Azure.
• Experience in retail, e-commerce, or high-scale consumer domains is a plus.

Why join our team? (Rewards)

Impact millions of people. As a member of our data science team, you will have the opportunity to make a tangible difference in the lives of millions of customers by delivering relevant and personalized recommendations that enhance their grocery shopping experience. Your work will directly contribute to increasing customer satisfaction and loyalty, driving business outcomes for our company.

Continuous learning and development. Challenge yourself. We are committed to fostering a culture of continuous learning and development. You will have access to resources and support for expanding your knowledge and skills in cutting-edge technologies, including recommender systems, machine learning and artificial intelligence. Our team encourages exploration and experimentation, providing opportunities to stay at the forefront of industry advancements.

Work on new developments in recommender systems. Join a team at the forefront of innovation in recommender systems and AI. You will have the chance to contribute to pushing the boundaries of what's possible in personalized recommendation technology. You will have the chance to work on exciting projects that leverage the latest developments in deep learning architectures and data science methodologies.

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Pay Transparency and Benefits

• The stated salary range represents the entire span applicable across all geographic markets from lowest to highest. Actual salary offers will be determined by multiple factors including but not limited to geographic location, relevant experience, knowledge, skills, other job-related qualifications, and alignment with market data and cost of labor. In addition to salary, this position is also eligible for variable compensation.
• Below is a list of some of the benefits we offer our associates:
• Health: Medical: with competitive plan designs and support for self-care, wellness and mental health. Dental: with in-network and out-of-network benefit. Vision: with in-network and out-of-network benefit.
• Wealth: 401(k) with Roth option and matching contribution. Health Savings Account with matching contribution (requires participation in qualifying medical plan). AD&D and supplemental insurance options to help ensure additional protection for you.
• Happiness: Paid time off with flexibility to meet your life needs, including 5 weeks of vacation time, 7 health and wellness days, 3 floating holidays, as well as 6 company-paid holidays per year. Paid leave for maternity, paternity and family care instances.

Pay Range

$125,000-$207,000 USD