Lead Data Scientist (P3764)

Lead Data Scientist, Relevancy Sciences Data Science & Research – Personalization & Loyalty Strategy (P3764)

Relevancy 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.

We 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.

What does the role entail? (Responsibilities)

Technical 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.

Develop 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.

Evaluate 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.

Model 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.

Cross-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.

Mentoring 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.

What skills and experience do you need? (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