Sr. Data Scientist

About the role

Title of role: Senior Data Scientist Location: New York or Boston; Hybrid (2 days in the office required) Approved Salary Range: 145k- 150k

About the Role:

Rue Gilt Groupe is hiring a Senior Data Scientist to build and ship the personalization systems behind Rue La La, Gilt, and ShopSimon. You will own products end to end, not just the models behind them: from problem framing and success metrics through feature engineering, training, real-time serving, and monitoring, and see your work reach 50M+ members every day.

Flash sale off-price is one of the hardest settings in e-commerce for recommendations. Inventory is limited and short-lived, new products and boutiques launch daily, and cold start is the norm, not the edge case. If that sounds like a fun problem, we would like to talk.

Key Responsibilities:

- Personalization at scale: Ranking and recommendation models that power product discovery across boutiques, product pages, and our AI shopping assistant

- Core algorithms: Boutique sort, similar styles, complete the look, and real-time reranking that blends member intent with merchandising goals

- Exploration and learning: Contextual bandits and adaptive strategies that adjust the experience to how each member likes to shop

- Product and model ownership: Shape the roadmap and success metrics with Product, then build the production training and inference pipelines, batch and real-time, with the monitoring and reliability to match

- Experimentation: Design offline evaluation and online A/B tests, and turn results into clear decisions with Product and Merchandising

- GenAI where it helps: Use LLMs and embeddings where they improve recommendations, and expose models as tools the shopping assistant can call

- Cross-functional impact: Partner with engineering, product, marketing, and merchandising teams, and present your work to leadership

Experience and Background Needed:

- Contextual bandits, reinforcement learning, or cold-start techniques

- Embeddings, two-tower or sequence models, and vector search

- Databricks (MLflow, Unity Catalog, Model Serving) or GCP (Gemini Enterprise Platform)

- Production LLM for inference, RAG, evaluation, or agent tool calling

- E-commerce, retail, or fashion experience

- Deriving insights from complex data through analysis and modeling

Our Stack:

- Databricks, Python, SQL, Spark, PyTorch, GCP (Gemini Enterprise Platform), and AWS.

About the AI & Data Science Team

We are a small, senior team that owns the product, the science, and the production systems. There is no handoff between deciding what to build, building the model, and shipping it, so you carry your work from idea to launch. You will have the freedom to try new techniques, the data to test them, and a direct line from your work to member experience and revenue.