Principal Data Scientist - Consumer

The role

You will be the technical lead for how Gopuff personalizes the shopping experience. You will design and ship recommendation, ranking, and personalization models, and lead work on agentic AI experiences for consumers.

What you will do

• Own consumer personalization end to end, including recommendations, ranking, and personalization across the home feed, search, product pages, cart, and CRM.
• Build candidate generation, retrieval, and learning-to-rank systems.
• Lead agentic AI for consumers: LLM-powered agents for planning, discovery, and reordering, including tool use, retrieval, evaluation, and guardrails.
• Decide when a gradient-boosted model, a two-tower network, or an LLM is the right tool, and combine them in production.
• Design A/B tests and offline evaluation frameworks, and connect model gains to customer and business outcomes.
• Partner with engineers and product managers on feature pipelines, model serving, latency budgets, and monitoring.
• Mentor senior and staff data scientists, lead design reviews, and raise standards across the team.
• Work with Product and Engineering leaders to choose high-impact problems and explain trade-offs to executives.

Required qualifications

• 10+ years of experience in data science or machine learning, or 8+ years with a PhD in a quantitative field.
• A track record of shipping recommendation, ranking, or personalization systems that measurably moved consumer metrics at scale.
• Deep knowledge of classic machine learning: gradient boosting, collaborative filtering, matrix factorization, learning-to-rank, embeddings, and causal and experimental methods.
• Hands-on experience building agentic AI systems with LLMs, including prompt and tool design, retrieval-augmented generation, multi-step agents, and evaluation of agent quality and safety.
• Expert Python skills and fluency with the core ML stack (for example pandas, scikit-learn, XGBoost or LightGBM, PyTorch or TensorFlow).
• Strong SQL and experience with large data warehouses; hands-on experience with Snowflake.
• Comfortable using AI coding assistants such as Claude, with the judgment to review, test, and validate AI-generated code and protect customer data.
• Solid grounding in A/B testing, offline-to-online metric alignment, and statistical inference.
• Experience leading technical direction across teams without direct authority, and mentoring senior data scientists.
• Clear communication with technical and non-technical partners, including executives.

Nice to have

• Experience with Databricks or a similar platform (Spark, MLflow, feature stores).
• Background in e-commerce, grocery, quick commerce, or marketplaces.
• Experience with real-time or session-based recommendations, contextual bandits, or reinforcement learning.
• Familiarity with agent frameworks and LLM evaluation tooling, and with fine-tuning or distilling models.
• Experience with dbt, Airflow, or similar tools for data pipelines.
• Publications, patents, or open-source work in recommender systems, information retrieval, or applied LLMs.

Benefits

• Medical, dental and vision insurance
• 401(k) retirement savings plan
• HSA or FSA eligibility
• Long and short-term disability insurance
• Fitness reimbursement program
• 25% employee discount and FAM Membership
• Flexible PTO
• Group life insurance
• EAP through AllOne Health

Before you apply

• Gopuff pays based on market pricing, and pay may vary by location.
• Starting pay depends on job-related skills, experience, qualifications, interview performance, and market conditions.

About the company

Gopuff delivers everyday essentials in minutes from its own network of micro-fulfillment centers. It is an equal opportunity employer.