Principal Search & Recommendation Architect

This is a contract-to-hire position for a Principal Search & Recommendation Architect located in Dallas, Texas. The anticipated duration is 6+ months.

Responsibilities

• Own enterprise search and recommendation architecture across digital commerce platforms.
• Lead development of personalized search experiences, product ranking algorithms, and recommendation strategies.
• Design and implement customer behavior models, customer segmentation frameworks, and next-best-action capabilities.
• Drive roadmap for personalized search rankings, recommendation engines, basket recommendations, loyalty personalization, digital coupon optimization, and mobile app personalization.
• Architect real-time ranking systems utilizing customer behavior signals and event streams.
• Build and scale semantic search and vector search solutions.
• Evaluate and integrate LLM-powered shopping experiences and conversational commerce capabilities.
• Partner with business stakeholders to improve conversion rates, basket size, customer engagement, retention, and digital revenue growth.
• Lead cloud modernization efforts including migration of machine learning workloads from AWS and Databricks environments toward GCP services.
• Establish architecture standards for feature stores, MLOps processes, experimentation frameworks, and model governance.
• Mentor engineering and data science teams while influencing strategy across multiple organizations.

Qualifications

• Required
• 10+ years of experience in machine learning, search, recommendation systems, or personalization platforms.
• Proven background architecting large-scale customer-facing platforms.
• Deep experience with search relevance, product ranking models, recommendation systems, personalization platforms, and customer analytics.
• Strong software engineering and machine learning foundation.
• Experience building real-time recommendation platforms, search ranking systems, behavioral targeting solutions, and customer propensity models.
• Expertise with Python.
• Expertise with Spark.
• Expertise with Databricks.
• Expertise with Kafka.
• Expertise with distributed data platforms.
• Experience designing experimentation frameworks and A/B testing strategies.
• Executive communication and stakeholder management experience.