Principal Applied Scientist

Responsibilities

• Advance the recommendation & ranking stack.
• Arcitect and productionize large-scale DNN/LLM-enhanced recommenders (representation learning, sequence modeling, retrieval/ranking, slate optimization), balancing user satisfaction, content quality, and business goals.
• Deepen user & content understanding. Gather and analyze user signals from diverse sources to gain a thorough understanding of user behaviors and utilize ML/AI techniques to interpret and predict user needs and preferences. Design and build models that assess content quality and utility aspects to ensure product safety and drive sustainable user engagement.
• Sacle E2E ML/AI systems. Collaborate with engineering on data contracts, feature stores, distributed training/inference, and automated rollout/rollback; drive architectural investments that increase agility and reliability of Discover’s AI platform.
• Drive innovation in AI-forward products. Collaborate with product, science and engineering team closely to innovate in AI-forward products, including agentic content feed experience with hyper personalized AI-generated content and generative UI.
• Mentor & influence. Provide technical leadership across problem framing, methodology selection, code quality, and publishing/knowledge-sharing; uplevel peers through design reviews, deep-dives, and principled decision-making.
• Stay close to users. Translate user engagements and behavioral history into model objectives and product bets; ensure our AI solutions elevate relevance, transparency, and engagement for real users.

Qualifications

• Required Qualifications: Bachelor's Degree in Statistics, Econometrics, Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering, or related field AND 8+ years related experience (e.g., statistics, predictive analytics, research) OR Master's Degree in Statistics, Econometrics, Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering, or related field AND 6+ years related experience (e.g., statistics, predictive analytics, research) OR Doctorate in Statistics, Econometrics, Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering, or related field AND 5+ years related experience (e.g., statistics, predictive analytics, research) OR equivalent experience.
• Preferred Qualifications: Master's Degree in Statistics, Econometrics, Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering, or related field AND 12+ years related experience (e.g., statistics, predictive analytics, research) OR Doctorate in Statistics, Econometrics, Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering, or related field AND 8+ years related experience (e.g., statistics, predictive analytics, research) OR equivalent experience. 6+ years of industry experience on applied AI/ML for web scale products. Having publications at top AI/ML conferences (e.g., KDD, SIGIR, NIPS, ICML, ICLR, RecSys, ACL, CIKM, CVPR, ICCV, etc.). Demonstrated capability to grow the business through the innovation of ML algorithms. Experience in Software Engineering and familiar with ML Infra.

Pay

This position is offered with a starting salary range of USD $165,600 - $296,400 per year, with a different range applicable to specific work locations, within the San Francisco Bay area and New York City metropolitan area, where the base pay range is USD $220,800 - $331,200 per year. Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation. For additional details on benefits and pay, visit here.