Principal AI Scientist - Personalization

Key Skills

Apache Hadoop, C Programming, C++, Data science techniques, Java Programming, Machine learning techniques, MapReduce, Python Programming, PyTorch, R Programming, Scala Programming, SQL, TensorFlow

Job Description

JOIN TARGET AI AS A PRINCIPAL AI SCIENTIST – PERSONALIZATION

As a Principal AI Scientist with Target AI (personalization team) – you’ll develop artificial intelligence models and algorithms that change the game in our retail data business. You’ll work closely with peer data scientists and business partners to continuously learn more about our business and particularly develop a deep understanding of the various processes we have in play. You will partner with ML Engineers and scientists on peer teams to build and productionize solutions for our business needs including design, development, deployment, and maintenance of algorithms and models. As a Principal, you will work with the CIO, AI team leadership and business partners to define product roadmaps that advance our ecosystem and solve large scale retail challenges.

Product Personalization team specifically focuses on exploring, developing recommendation systems and applying advanced machine learning and deep learning techniques, and Reinforcement Learning (RL) based techniques to give guests the best experience to inspire and delight them and make their shopping journey easy. We aim to develop these solutions to be tangible, practical, scalable and efficient allowing us to quickly respond to Guest needs. You have the unique opportunity to invent new shopper and advertiser experiences as well as accelerate the pace of machine learning and optimization! You’ll influence customer facing shopping experiences and help grow retail. This role will be a key contributor helping power the personalization engine at Target.

In this role as a Principal AI Scientist on the Product Personalization team, you will:

• Mentor and coach Target AI team members
• Be a technical leader architecting effective AI/ML driven solutions for business problems

Subject matter expert in the fields of ML, recommendation systems and personalization

• Be the voice of reason advocating scalable AI/ML solutions to impact our business by improving our ability to serve our Guests
• Create classic and deep models for recommending our guest what would they like to buy next in their shopping journey and develop (training/inference) code involving machine learning, recommendation systems, deep learning, transfer learning, GNN etc.
• Influence and lead the team in creating scalable and observable system architectures, associated with appropriate containerized training/inference modules, CI/CD pipelines as well as model testing and monitoring procedures
• Partner with POs and business teams in finding new opportunities (where personalization can have a meaningful impact to Target), in defining the problem, and in scoping the technical solutions including technology roadmap, architecture, and skills required
• Ideate, in collaboration with other leaders in personalization, new directions of work within personalization and broader AI
• Closely collaborate with partners from AI portfolio teams such as Foundations, Search (Digital & Marketing) and Demand Forecasting (Merchandizing)
• Develop and drive best practices and processes across the board
• Conduct deep data analyses on massive ad user and contextual data sets
• Invent ways to overcome technical limitations and enable new forms of analyses to drive key technical and business decisions
• Stay familiar with state-of-the-art machine learning techniques to our domain problems
• Produce peer-reviewed scientific paper in top journals and conferences

What we're looking for:

• MS or PhD in Mathematics, Statistics, Operations Research, Physics, Computer Science and/or equivalent research/work experience 
• 7+ years of experience in modeling and algorithm design
• Significant expertise in recommendation systems, machine learning, deep learning, transfer learning, embeddings, RL, time series modeling
• Highly proficient in Python and JVM ecosystem (Java, Scala, and/or Kotlin)
• Experienced in using frameworks such as PyTorch and Tensorflow
• Deep understanding of data structures and algorithms
• Ability to test and measure algorithms/models, design and orchestrate suitable MLOps practices
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills

Bonus Points:

• You have deployed models with large-scale business impact in commercial setting
• Experience with large event-driven distributed systems and multi-threaded applications
• Strong understanding of reinforcement learning or related areas both in theory and practice 

Why work with us at Target?

• You will work directly on the AI problems that have the most impact on Target's entire supply chain, forecasting and merchandising. 
• We love open source! Many of our team members contribute to open source communities and get to do it during work time. We try to contribute back to our communities where we can and are grateful to be able to open source some of our own projects!
• We value diversity. We believe that diversity and inclusion is of core importance when try to create positive in-store experiences for our guests, and we think it is also critically important when building our teams.?Read more about our commitment to diversity and inclusion
• We value our team members for who they are, not just what they can get done. We treat out team members like people, not like cogs in a machine. We are parents, hobbyists, enthusiasts, family members, and community members, and can offer flexibility to our team members' schedules and work arrangements so that they can flourish both inside and outside of work.