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Job Summary:
Thrive Market is an online membership-based market focused on making healthy and sustainable living accessible. They are seeking a Director of Applied AI & Machine Learning to lead their ML organization and drive personalized shopping experiences through innovative machine learning strategies.
Responsibilities:
• Define and execute the ML roadmap for Thrive Market, aligning machine learning investments with business priorities across search, discovery, personalization, growth, and operations.
• Build, scale, and mentor a high-performing ML team spanning data science, ML engineering, and analytics.
• Serve as the primary ML voice in product and engineering leadership forums, translating business objectives into ML-solvable problems and communicating technical trade-offs to non-technical stakeholders.
• Own the strategy and execution of Thrive Market's server-driven personalization, driving dynamically assembled, per-member experiences across all major site surfaces.
• Define and evolve the overall recommendations strategy - both global (site-wide signals and ranking) and localized (surface-specific, contextual, and intent-driven), ensuring recommendations compound in relevance and business impact over time.
• Own the ML search strategy end-to-end: relevance, ranking, personalization, and retrieval to continuously improve member experience and engagement through iterative modeling and experimentation.
• Develop and evolve production ML decision systems across member lifecycle, demand forecasting, and segmentation to be used across finance, growth, and operations to guide domain strategy, capital allocation, and retention.
• Partner with cross-functional teams (Product, Marketing, Merchandising, Finance) to identify high-impact ML applications and ensure models are integrated into business workflows, not just prototyped.
• Strengthen ML platform foundations: model deployment, feature pipelines, validation frameworks, monitoring, and experiment velocity.
• Drive adoption of best practices for ML reliability—automated testing, model health monitoring, graceful degradation, and observability.
• Enable faster iteration cycles across the ML team through tooling, infrastructure investment, and process improvements.
• Lead applied GenAI exploration, including prototyping LLM-powered assistants for shopping, product discovery, and personalization workflows.
• Evaluate emerging ML techniques and tooling, maintaining a pragmatic lens on what delivers member and business value versus what is experimental.
Qualifications:
Required:
• 8+ years of experience in data science, machine learning, or applied ML engineering, with at least 3 years leading ML teams in a production environment.
• Deep technical expertise in search, retrieval, ranking, and/or recommendation systems, with demonstrated experience building multi-stage ML pipelines at scale.
• Proven track record of building and scaling an ML organization—hiring, mentoring, setting technical standards, and establishing team culture.
• Experience designing and deploying ML systems that directly drive business outcomes (revenue, engagement, retention, operational efficiency) in an e-commerce or consumer-facing platform.
• Strong cross-functional partnership skills—able to work effectively with Product, Engineering, Marketing, Finance, and executive leadership.
• Experience with ML platform and infrastructure patterns: feature stores, model serving, experimentation frameworks, and monitoring.
• Comfort operating as both a strategic leader and a hands-on technical contributor, especially in the early stages of building out the team.
Preferred:
• Experience with server-driven or backend-driven UI/personalization architectures.
• Background in e-commerce, marketplace, or subscription-based platforms.
• Experience with NLP/semantic search (e.g., BERT-based encoders, dense retrieval).
• Familiarity with pLTV modeling, demand forecasting, or similar decision-science applications.
• Hands-on experience with LLMs and applied GenAI in production or near-production contexts.
• Mission-driven orientation—experience at or affinity for companies focused on health, wellness, sustainability, or social impact.
Company:
Thrive Market is a membership-based online company that offers natural and organic food products. Founded in 2013, the company is headquartered in Los Angeles, USA, with a team of 501-1000 employees. The company is currently Late Stage.