Impact.com

Data Scientist, Next Gen Recommendation Systems

New York City · Contract

Sponsorship not specified$100k-$125kDetected 69 days ago

PythonSQLBigQueryDatabricksVector DatabasesGCPCI/CDRESTMachine LearningDeep LearningTensorFlowPyTorchSparkData ScienceNLPMLOpsA/B TestingExcelShopifyCollaborationProblem SolvingMentoring

About the role

As consumers increasingly rely on recommendations from people and communities they trust, impact.com helps brands show up where it matters most.
Our ecosystem connects a rich set of entities-advertisers, media publishers, creators, products, and consumers-and the relationships between them are where the real value lives.
Your work will help surface the right partnerships, the right products, and the right content across this network at scale.

Responsibilities

Design, build, and evaluate recommendation models that operate across heterogeneous entities-advertisers, publishers, creators, products, and consumers-and the relationships between them.
Build models and pipelines that serve recommendations in both batch and real-time contexts.
Partner with Engineering on retrieval infrastructure, vector search, feature stores, and low-latency serving patterns.
Design offline evaluation (offline replay, counterfactual evaluation, holdout sets) and online experiments (A/B tests, holdouts, interleaving) to quantify model impact.
Apply appropriate statistical methods, recognize common pitfalls in recommender evaluation (position bias, feedback loops, selection effects), and translate results into clear recommendations for product and engineering partners.
Document your work so that models, features, and decisions are understandable and reproducible by others.
Contribute to evolving our architecture toward graph-based approaches: learn semantic embeddings of entities and relationships, apply graph neural networks or attention aware graph transformer models where they add value, and build representations that generalize across surfaces and use cases.
Own the full lifecycle of your work: data and feature design, model development, evaluation, launch, monitoring, and iteration.
Build production-grade pipelines, write code that other engineers can extend, and partner with MLOps on reproducibility, observability, and reliability.
impact.com is the world's leading commerce partnership marketing platform, transforming the way businesses grow by enabling them to discover, manage, and scale partnerships across the entire customer journey.

Requirements

3+ years of experience in data science / applied ML, with a track record of shipping production models that delivered measurable user or business impact.
experience working with large-scale data and distributed compute (Spark/Databricks or equivalent).
Insatiable curiosity about new techniques, architectures, and tools-and a track record of teaching yourself things quickly.
Strong Python and SQL skills
Hands-on experience building recommendation or ranking systems-candidate generation, learning-to-rank, retrieval and reranking, or implicit feedback modeling.
Experience with embeddings and representation learning for users, items, content, or other entities.
ML engineering capability (or strong willingness and demonstrated ability to develop it): you can build, ship, and maintain production pipelines-not just prototypes in notebooks.
Strong experimentation skills: designing and analyzing A/B tests, interpreting results, and communicating findings to stakeholders.
Relentless user of AI coding agents in your day-to-day workflow, with a clear sense of where they accelerate you and where they don't.
Insatiable curiosity about new techniques, architectures, and tools-and a track record of teaching yourself things quickly. You read papers, try new tools, and bring ideas back to the team.

Skills

Strong problem-solving instincts and the ability to operate with growing autonomy in ambiguous, evolving spaces.
designing and analyzing A/B tests, interpreting results, and communicating findings to stakeholders.
Preferred / Nice to have
Experience with graph-based ML: graph neural networks (KGAT, transformers or similar), graph-aware retrieval, or knowledge graph embeddings.
Experience with modern deep learning recommender architectures (two-tower, sequence/transformer-based recommenders, multi-task ranking).
Familiarity with vector search and vector databases (FAISS, ScaNN, Vespa, Milvus, or similar) and approximate nearest neighbor methods.
Experience with real-time ML serving, feature stores (Feast, Tecton, or equivalent), and low-latency inference patterns.
Exposure to contextual bandits, reinforcement learning, or off-policy evaluation in recommendation settings.
Familiarity with PyTorch/TensorFlow and PyTorch Geometric / DGL for graph workloads.
Familiarity with GCP (Vertex AI, BigQuery, Cloud Run) and/or mature MLOps practices (CI/CD for ML, monitoring, drift detection).
Experience in adtech, martech, e-commerce, or two-sided/multi-sided marketplace recommendations.
What Sets You Apart

Compensation

$100,000 - $125,000 per year, plus an additional 5% variable annual bonus contingent on Company performance and eligible to receive a Restricted Stock Unit (RSU) grant.
This is the pay range the Company believes is equitable for this position at the time of this posting.
Consistent with applicable law, compensation will be determined based on the skills, qualifications, and experience of the applicant along with the requirements of the position, and the Company reserves the right to modify this pay range at any time.
Our mental health and wellness benefit includes up to 12 fully covered therapy/coaching sessions per year, with additional dependent coverage.
A Stake in Our Growth: We offer Restricted Stock Units (RSUs) as part of our total compensation, giving you a stake in the company's growth with a 3-year vesting schedule, pending Board approval.

Benefits

Medical, Dental, and Vision insurance
Flexible spending accounts and 401(k)
That's why we've built a benefits package that supports your well-being, growth, and work-life balance.
Flexible Working: Our Responsible PTO policy means you can take the time off you need to rest and recharge.
We're committed to a positive work-life balance and provide a flexible environment that allows you to be happy and fulfilled in both your career and your personal life.
Health and Wellness: Your well-being is a priority.
Our mental health and wellness benefit includes up to 12 fully covered therapy/coaching sessions per year, with additional dependent coverage.
A Stake in Our Growth: We offer Restricted Stock Units (RSUs) as part of our total compensation, giving you a stake in the company's growth with a 3-year vesting schedule, pending Board approval.
Investing in Your Growth: We're committed to your continuous learning.
Parental Support: We offer a generous parental leave policy, 26 weeks of fully paid leave for the primary caregiver and 13 weeks fully paid leave for the secondary caregiver.
Technology Financial Support: We provide a technology stipend to help you set up your home office and a monthly allowance to cover your internet expenses.

Company info

At impact.com, we believe that when you're happy and fulfilled, you do your best work.

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