Associate Director - Search & Recommendations Science (AI)

Location: Mountain View, California, United States

Annual base salary: $300,000 per year

Company

hirify.global operates a large online home marketplace and develops technology that helps customers discover and purchase products for their homes.

What you will do

• Define and drive the machine learning strategy and roadmap for search, retrieval, ranking, personalization, recommendations, and customer understanding.
• Lead, recruit, mentor, and develop machine learning scientists and practitioners.
• Translate advances in information retrieval, recommender systems, foundation models, multimodal learning, and generative AI into production customer experiences.
• Guide large-scale semantic and multimodal retrieval, learning-to-rank, customer and product representation, and sequential modeling systems.
• Establish rigorous experimentation and evaluation practices tied to customer and business outcomes.
• Partner with senior Product, Engineering, and Design leaders to align priorities and deliver production systems.

Requirements

• PhD with 8+ years, MS with 10+ years, or BS with 12+ years of experience in search, recommendations, or personalization.
• Significant experience leading teams in search, recommendations, information retrieval, ranking, personalization, or related machine learning domains.
• Deep technical expertise in recommender systems, retrieval and ranking, and personalization.
• Strong understanding of foundation models, large language models, vision-language models, and generative approaches.
• Experience defining technical strategy and delivering large-scale machine learning systems with measurable impact.
• Strong expertise in experimentation, statistical modeling, online and offline evaluation, and senior stakeholder communication.

Nice to have

• Experience with large-scale search and recommendations in e-commerce, marketplaces, or consumer technology.
• Experience with multimodal models, sequential recommendation, graph-based learning, bandits, or generative recommendation.
• Publications, patents, open-source contributions, or participation in relevant research communities such as NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, KDD, SIGIR, or RecSys.

Culture & Benefits

• Comprehensive medical, financial, and additional employee benefits.
• Potential equity, bonuses, commissions, and other compensation in addition to base salary.
• Commitment to equal opportunity and reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities.
• Environment focused on technology, creative problem-solving, learning, and collaboration.