Lead Data Scientist (P3764)

8451 • Chicago, OH

1d • $125,000 - $207,000 • Onsite

About The Position

84.51° is a retail data science, insights and media company that helps The Kroger Co., consumer packaged goods companies, agencies, publishers and affiliates create more personalized and valuable experiences for shoppers across the path to purchase. They utilize first-party retail data from over 62 million U.S. households through the Kroger Plus loyalty card program to fuel a customer-centric journey using 84.51° Insights, 84.51° Loyalty Marketing and Kroger Precision Marketing. The Relevancy Sciences Team is responsible for powering relevant, personalized, and scalable customer experiences across Kroger’s e-commerce ecosystem, building and evolving the science behind search and recommendations for millions of customers. The Lead Data Scientist will provide technical leadership across search and recommender systems, focusing on modern model architectures and production-ready machine learning, and is ideal for someone with depth in applied machine learning, strong systems thinking, cross-functional influence, and who contributes towards agentic capabilities.

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 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.

Nice To Haves

• Experience evaluating or prototyping GenAI-based solutions is preferred.
• Experience in retail, e-commerce, or high-scale consumer domains is a plus.

Responsibilities

• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.

Benefits

• 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.
• 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.
• 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.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Number of Employees: 501-1,000 employees