Sr. Manager, Data Science/Machine Learning - Search Relevance

Key Skills

Apache Hadoop, AWS, Design of Experiment, Java Programming, Python Programming, SPARK Programming, SQL

Job Description

Products and Technology

Job Details

We are:

• The Search Relevance team at Salesforce is seeking a proven technical leader to help drive data science efforts powering search intelligence for our multi-tenant cloud-scale search system.
• We build systems, large scale data processing pipelines, and a variety of machine learning algorithms (e.g. https://github.com/salesforce/ml4ir), underpinning learning to rank, query understanding, intent classification, question-answering, and semantic search features to deliver intelligent query processing at scale; working in close conjunction with the rest of search infrastructure teams to develop high performance, fault-tolerant distributed search systems that learn from behavioral inputs from Enterprise customers.
• As part of the Search Relevance team, you will lead development of relevance and ranking functions that drive the richness, quality and effectiveness of the search experience across all of Salesforce’s products.

You are:

• Ideal candidates have experience solving real-world search relevance challenges in large scale hosted search systems, and have a strong track record of leading teams focused on building machine learning models and deploying them in production.
• You are a leader who enjoys spending time thinking about how to hire, motivate and retain the best, who can mentor and coach data scientists and engineers to collaborate to handle bigger challenges, find fulfillment in their work, and execute on product goals.
• You are a champion of relevance. You care deeply about how to measure it, report it, and improve it. You know various kinds of metrics, how to evaluate, troubleshoot, align, and evolve them. Crucially, you understand the importance of evangelizing, building consensus around, and leveraging metrics to drive decision-making.
• You are super passionate about search. If you are excited by the opportunity to work with a world class technical team to deliver a high traffic, high performance, highly evolved search solution that satisfies millions of requests daily on a diverse corpus of data, including structured, unstructured and social feeds, and delivers an experience that delights millions of users, then we want to talk with you.

Responsibilities:

• Partner with product and engineering teams to define the vision & roadmap for data scientists and engineers that apply Information Retrieval and Machine Learning techniques to retrieve relevant results and provide optimal ranking.
• Drive efforts to implement strategies based on natural language processing, intent analysis, machine learning, personalization, question-answering and other leading edge technologies that will result in measurable relevance improvements in a variety of use cases and businesses that leverage our search to deliver rich user experiences.
• Own the full lifecycle of model development from ideation and data exploration, algorithm design and testing, algorithm development and deployment, to algorithm monitoring and tuning in production.
• Help design and operationalize usage metrics and patterns to identify opportunities to improve relevance of search.
• Analyze and understand the different products, devices and use cases that are driven by search across salesforce and develop strategies for improving relevance.
• Contribute to a culture of data-driven decision-making through A/B experimentation, including interpreting and presenting results to a diverse audience
• Hire and lead a team of high-caliber data scientists with superb academic credentials and proven industry experience with developing machine learning algorithms for search relevance use cases.
• Be a master in cross-functional collaboration by developing deep relationships with key partners across the company and coordinating with working teams.
• Constantly learn, have a clear pulse on innovation across the enterprise search, AI/ML, and data science communities.

Required Skills:

• MS, or PhD in computer science or a related field, or equivalent work experience
• 5+ years of hands-on experience developing production-ready machine learning driven products such as recommender systems or search ranking systems
• Experience using advanced statistical and machine learning techniques such as clustering, linear and logistic regressions, PCA, gradient boosting machines (GBM), support vector machines (SVM), learning-to-rank, neural networks (e.g. RNN, CNN), and other deep learning algorithms (e.g., Wide & Deep) to solve business problems on large-scale data sets.
• 3+ years of experience as a people manager managing data scientists and/or machine learning engineers, including recruitment, role design, work design, and talent management
• Solid foundation in machine learning and statistics
• Track record of leading highly impactful projects from conception to finish
• An expert communicator in written and verbal form; ability to work well with executives, technologists, and influence across all levels of the organization.
• Superb quantitative reasoning and interpretation skills with strong ability to provide analysis-driven insights and recommendations.
• Understanding of A/B testing, expertise in metric definition and analysis
• Practical experience with Hadoop/Spark (or similar systems)
• Strong grasp of Python, Java or other comparable Object Oriented Programming Language
• Proficient in SQL with strong data exploration and manipulation skills
• Experience with Lucene/Solr or similar search systems

Desired Skills:

• Strong academic/research connection with industry publications in Search/Recommendations space would be a big plus.
• Experience with deep learning techniques for natural language processing and/or information retrieval
• Experience using cloud platforms such as GCP and AWS for model development and operationalization
• Experience with Agile software development and Test Driven Development methodologies