Director of Applied AI & Machine Learning

ABOUT THRIVE MARKET 

Thrive Market is looking for a Director of Applied AI & Machine Learning to lead the company’s ML organization. Thrive Market exists to make healthy and sustainable living easy and affordable. That mission is fundamentally a personalization problem, connecting the right member with the right products, at the right moment, in a way that builds lasting habits and loyalty. Machine learning is the most powerful tool available to solve that problem at scale. This role sits at the intersection of applied science, engineering, and product strategy.

Thrive Market is moving toward a dynamic layout architecture. Rather than relying on static templates and generic carousels, the vision is for every member to see a personalized storefront; product recommendations, search results, promotions, and content all dynamically assembled by ML-powered systems. This leader will be the driving force behind making that vision a reality.

You will lead a team of Senior Data Scientists and also a group of cross-functional engineers to deliver ML-assisted shopping from ML model to customer experiments. The vision is for models to move from development to live experiments in weeks rather than quarters. This role would oversee the hiring of multiple team members (Sr. Data Scientist, ML Data Engineer,  Fullstack Engineer, Mobile Engineer). This is a hands-on leadership role: you will set the technical direction, build and scale the team, partner deeply with Product, Engineering, and business stakeholders, and ensure ML is embedded across the platform, not siloed as a service function.

ML Strategy & Organizational Leadership

• 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.

Personalization & Ranking Systems

• 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.

ML Decision Systems & Business Impact

• 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.

ML Platform & Infrastructure

• 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.

Applied GenAI & Innovation

• 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.

Must-Have

• 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.

Strong Signals

• 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.

• Compensation Description - The base salary range for this position is $250,000 - $300,000/Per Year.
• Compensation may vary outside of this range depending on several factors, including a candidate’s qualifications, skills, competencies and experience, and geographic location.
• Total Compensation includes Base Salary, Annual Bonus, Stock Options, Health & Wellness Benefits, Flexible PTO, and more!
• This position requires traveling to our HQ office in Los Angeles, California, twice a year for all-company summits; once in the summer and once in the winter.

• Comprehensive health benefits (medical, dental, vision, life and disability)
• Competitive salary (DOE) + equity
• 401k plan
• 9 Observed Holidays
• Flexible Paid Time Off
• Subsidized ClassPass Membership with access to fitness classes and wellness and beauty experiences
• Ability to work in our beautiful office in Playa Vista
• Free Thrive Market membership with exclusive employee discount
• Coverage for Life Coaching & Therapy Sessions on our holistic mental health and well-being platform

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