Staff Applied Scientist, Search & Discovery

The role

The Staff Applied Scientist will drive building search and recommendations from the ground up. You will explore data, form hypotheses, prototype approaches, and partner with engineering to take models to production.

What you will do

• Improve search retrieval and ranking.
• Build recommendation systems from the ground up.
• Run exploratory analysis on behavioral and catalog data.
• Apply advanced query understanding including intent recognition and semantic understanding.
• Identify and fix data problems to raise data quality.
• Invent and build working versions of formulas, models, and re-ranking approaches.
• Evaluate image-based search and color matching.
• Build and extend evaluation frameworks and success metrics.
• Collaborate with product, engineering, and catalog teams.

Required qualifications

• Track record building search, recommendations, or ranking systems that shipped to real users.
• Advanced degree in a quantitative field such as computer science, machine learning, statistics, or applied math, or equivalent hands-on experience.
• Deep understanding of search and recommendation systems, especially retrieval, ranking, and relevance.
• Strong query understanding and NLP, including semantic and embedding-based retrieval.
• Real exploratory and experimental rigor including statistical modeling, experimental design, and hypothesis testing.
• Hands-on building ability to prototype and implement ideas.
• Some experience deploying ML or data systems to production, or partnering closely on it.

Nice to have

• Experience with multimodal or image-based search, and with color or perceptual science.
• E-commerce or marketplace search and recommendations experience.
• Experience managing vendor and home-grown systems in conjunction with one another.

Benefits

• Flexible PTO
• Sick Days
• Paid National Holidays
• Medical, dental, vision and short-term/long-term disability plans
• Employee assistance program
• 401(k) eligible after first 90 days
• Community event sponsorship
• Career growth opportunities

About the company

Material Bank is the world’s largest material marketplace for the architecture and design industry. It connects designers with materials from leading brands across 37 countries.