Local Intent Data Mining Specialist

NewsBreak•Mountain View, CA

15h•Remote

About The Position

NewsBreak is seeking a Local Intent Data Mining Specialist to build systems that understand local consumer demand. This role involves turning raw queries, behavior, and context into structured intent, focusing on query understanding, user-intent classification, semantic search, and the development of intent taxonomies and interest graphs. The specialist will be responsible for bringing Large Language Models (LLMs) into production to enhance local search and recommendations, ensuring they genuinely understand consumer intent. The position requires working with embeddings, retrieval, and Natural Language Understanding (NLU) to connect consumer language to local supply and defining metrics to measure intent quality's impact on conversion.

Requirements

5+ years as an Applied Scientist or ML Engineer on query understanding, intent, semantic search, or NLU.
Production experience shipping models that serve real users — not purely offline or research work.
Hands-on with embeddings, semantic search, intent classification, taxonomy, or interest-graph construction.
Experience bringing LLMs into production systems.
Comfort working at consumer-internet data scale.

Nice To Haves

Background at Google Search / Ads quality, Meta, TikTok, Pinterest, DoorDash, Instacart, Amazon Search/Alexa, or Apple.
Built a user-intent taxonomy or interest graph at a consumer internet company.
Consumer-intent or personalization work specifically at a local platform (DoorDash, Instacart).

Responsibilities

Build query-understanding, user-intent classification, and semantic-search models for local consumer demand.
Design and grow intent taxonomies and interest graphs over local categories and merchants.
Ship LLM-powered features into production for search and recommendations at consumer scale.
Work with embeddings, retrieval, and NLU to connect messy consumer language to local supply.
Define metrics and run experiments that tie intent quality to downstream conversion.