Lead Data Scientist – Recommendations

Role Overview

The Lead Data Scientist – Recommendations will provide technical leadership for the machine learning systems that power Target’s digital recommendations and personalization experiences. Working closely with data scientists, engineers, product managers, and business stakeholders, you will identify opportunities to improve guest experiences through recommendation, retrieval, ranking, and personalization solutions at a massive scale.

What You Will Do

You will lead the design, development, evaluation, and deployment of machine learning models that influence how millions of guests discover products across Target’s digital experiences. Leveraging expertise in machine learning, deep learning, experimentation, and optimization, you will translate ambiguous business challenges into scalable algorithmic solutions that drive measurable guest and business impact.

Why It Might Be a Fit

You will be responsible for driving projects from initial problem definition through production deployment and measurement, balancing innovation with operational excellence and long-term maintainability. You will help shape the technical direction of Target’s recommendation capabilities, establishing best practices for model development, evaluation, and measurement while influencing decisions across product, engineering, and data science teams.

Requirements

• PhD or MS in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Statistics, Applied Mathematics, Operations Research, or a related quantitative field
• 2+ years of industry experience
• 5+ years of experience developing machine learning solutions scaling recommendation, personalization, ranking, retrieval, or search machine learning systems
• Experience with reinforcement learning and/or contextual bandit design, implementation, and evaluation
• Strong programming skills in Python and SQL
• Experience working with large-scale data processing and analytics platforms such as Spark or equivalent
• Deep understanding of machine learning, deep learning, optimization, statistics, probability, and experimental design
• Experience designing, analyzing, and interpreting online experiments and using results to inform product and business decisions
• Demonstrated ability to translate ambiguous business challenges into scalable machine learning solutions
• Demonstrated ability to influence technical direction and drive alignment across product, engineering, and business stakeholders
• Experience leveraging modern AI and generative AI tools to accelerate development, experimentation, and model delivery
• Excellent communication skills with the ability to clearly communicate complex technical concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences
• Strong software engineering fundamentals, including testing, code reviews, documentation, and maintainable system design

Benefits

• Comprehensive health benefits
• 401(k)
• Employee discount
• Short term disability
• Long term disability
• Paid sick leave
• Paid national holidays
• Paid vacation

Tagged as: Python, SQL