{"id":729467,"url":"https://alion.io/job/8451-lead-data-scientist-p3764","title":"Lead Data Scientist - Relevancy Sciences (P3764)","company":{"id":693522,"name":"84.51","domain":"8451.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/8451-com","size_band":"51-200","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Greenhouse","truth_index":null},"role":"Data Science","role_family":"Data Science","seniority":"lead","employment_type":null,"work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Cincinnati, United States","Chicago, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":{"min_usd":110000,"max_usd":218000,"period":"year","method":"role_seniority_country_remote_cell","sample_n":358},"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"A/B Testing","optional":false},{"name":"Agentic Workflows","optional":false},{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"Azure","optional":false},{"name":"GCP","optional":false},{"name":"LLM","optional":false},{"name":"Machine Learning","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"RAG","optional":false},{"name":"Recommender Systems","optional":false},{"name":"Spark","optional":false},{"name":"SQL","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-07-10T18:26:46Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-09-30","last_verified_at":"2026-10-12T15:15:09Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":93,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":93},"description":"84.51° Overview:\n84.51° is a retail data science, insights and media company. We help The Kroger Co., consumer packaged goods companies, agencies, publishers and affiliates create more personalized and valuable experiences for shoppers across the path to purchase.\nPowered by cutting-edge science, we utilize first-party retail data from more than 62 million U.S. households sourced through the Kroger Plus loyalty card program to fuel a more customer-centric journey using 84.51° Insights, 84.51° Loyalty Marketing and our retail media advertising solution, Kroger Precision Marketing.\n84.51° follows a 5-day in-office work schedule to support collaboration, alignment, and team connection.\nJoin us at 84.51°!\n__________________________________________________________\nLead Data Scientist - Relevancy Sciences\nRelevancy 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.\nWe 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.\nResponsibilities:\nTechnical 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.\nDevelop 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.\nEvaluate 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.\nModel 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.\nCross-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.\nMentoring 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.\nRequirements: \nBachelor’s, Master’s, or PhD in Computer Science, Data Science, Statistics, Mathematics, Engineering, or a related quantitative field.\n6+ years applied ML with explicit search and/or recommendation systems experience.\nDemonstrated experience designing and building systems at scale - including representation learning, candidate retrieval and ranking with multi-stage pipelines\nProficient in Python and SQL, with experience processing large-scale data in distributed environments (e.g., Spark).\nTrack record of shipping ML systems that moved business or customer metrics at scale - not just exposure to frameworks or techniques.\nStrong foundation in statistics, experimentation, and data analysis, including design of experiments and A/B testing.\nHands-on experience building or rigorously evaluating LLM- and agent-based systems (e.g., RAG, agentic workflows, LLM-based evaluation), with clear judgment on where these techniques apply and where they don't.\nExperience partnering with engineering teams to deploy and maintain machine learning systems in production.\nUnderstanding of real-time systems, model serving, feature pipelines, and monitoring.\nAbility to make practical tradeoffs between model complexity, performance, latency, and scalability.\nDemonstrated ability to lead technical work across projects and influence direction across data science, engineering, and product teams.\nExperience mentoring or guiding other data scientists and contributing to a strong technical culture.\nExperience working with cloud platforms such as GCP or Azure.\nExperience in retail, e-commerce, or high-scale consumer domains is a plus.\nWhy join our team? (Rewards)\nImpact 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.\nContinuous 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.\nWork on new developments in search & recommender systems. Join a team at the forefront of innovation in search, 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.\nPay Transparency and Benefits\nThe 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.\nBelow is a list of some of the benefits we offer our associates: \nHealth: 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.\nWealth: 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.\nHappiness: 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. \nBase Pay Range\n$125,000—$207,000 USD","description_format":"text","description_chars":7853,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":null,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":{"level":"bachelor","optional":false},"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Continuous learning"],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Commerce"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-09-11T09:26:43Z"},{"event":"close","at":"2026-09-29T23:51:54Z"},{"event":"reopen","at":"2026-09-30T18:35:35Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":20,"band":"cold","label":"Long shot","p_open":1,"p_active":0.545,"p_room":0.36,"age_days":93,"expected_fill_days":50,"reasons":["conf:3","velocity","win:tail","crowd:"],"computed_at":"2026-10-12T06:55:09Z"},"pay":null,"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/8451-lead-data-scientist-p3764","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/8451-lead-data-scientist-p3764.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-12T17:37:00Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":28340,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-13T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":693522},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=693522"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2F8451-lead-data-scientist-p3764"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2F8451-lead-data-scientist-p3764"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2F8451-lead-data-scientist-p3764"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/8451-lead-data-scientist-p3764\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2F8451-lead-data-scientist-p3764"}]}