Senior Data Scientist - Personalization & Relevance

Nordstrom•Seattle, WA

2d•$166,000 - $258,000•Hybrid

About The Position

Nordstrom is seeking a Senior Data Scientist to advance personalization, recommendations, search, and browse relevance across its digital shopping experience. The role combines machine learning expertise, experimentation, and customer understanding to improve how customers are matched with relevant products and experiences. It will help evolve the Data Science organization from isolated model development toward connected, measurable, reusable personalization capabilities. This is an applied data science role: identify customer and business problems, propose solutions, iterate, and deliver with Engineering. The position is hybrid in the Seattle, Washington area, and requires working in the Nordstrom Seattle office at least four days per week. Success includes making offline evaluation more predictive of customer outcomes; sharing customer and product understanding across recommendation and relevance capabilities; testing more hypotheses without lowering scientific standards; reusing personalization across experiences; adopting ML and GenAI approaches based on demonstrated customer value; and improving other scientists’ technical and experimental practices through leadership.

Requirements

At least 6 years of hands-on experience in Data Science or Machine Learning roles.
Bachelor’s degree in a quantitative field such as statistics, computer science, mathematics, or engineering, or equivalent practical experience.
Deep experience with recommendation systems, ranking, personalization, search, or information retrieval.
Strong knowledge of machine learning, deep learning, experimentation, and statistical evaluation.
Experience with embeddings, neural ranking, transformers, or related modern ML techniques, including adapting existing open-source and pre-trained models.
Strong Python and SQL skills, including experience working with large-scale data such as BigQuery.
Experience using AI tools such as Claude Code in daily workflows and applying LLM or agentic approaches to real problems.
Experience moving models from research through production evaluation.
Ability to reason about customer and business outcomes beyond offline model metrics.
Experience working closely with Product and Engineering, including framing problems and defining outcome metrics with business partners.
Strong technical communication and mentorship skills.
Willingness to work in the Nordstrom Seattle office at least four days per week.

Nice To Haves

Advanced degree.
Familiarity with cloud ML platforms such as Google Vertex AI or AWS machine learning pipelines.

Responsibilities

Develop and improve recommendation, ranking, relevance, and personalization approaches.
Build deeper representations of customer intent, product understanding, and shopping context.
Evaluate and apply modern approaches, using existing open-source and pre-trained resources where appropriate, including embeddings, sequence models, multimodal models, foundation models, and generative AI.
Design offline evaluation frameworks that better predict online customer outcomes.
Partner with Product and Engineering to define customer problems, desired outcomes, success metrics, and appropriate scientific approaches.
Design and analyze online experiments to understand the impact of relevance and personalization approaches.
Investigate differential effects across customer cohorts, product categories, and shopping contexts.
Connect candidate generation, ranking, customer understanding, product understanding, and feedback signals into a more coherent personalization system.
Develop reusable evaluation, feature, and modeling approaches for multiple customer experiences.
Use AI-assisted development tools in daily workflows and bring agentic and LLM-based approaches into personalization decisioning.
Mentor scientists and help establish strong technical practices across the team.