Lead Data Scientist

About the Role We care deeply about the success of our customers and strive to help them achieve their goals in inspiring and engaging with their workforce. Sense is seeking a Lead Data Scientist to deliver our contractor communication platform to the world's best places to work. Sense is a rapidly scaling company making this the best environment to take on ownership as well as learning how to grow a company. Sense is building an intelligent recruiting automation platform to help job seekers find the right opportunity. Sense's platform is responsible for interactions with millions of candidates for help gathering their relevant skills, updating their resumes and identifying those jobs for which they are best suited. We're excited to expand the Sense platform with new capabilities to save candidates and recruiters time and streamline the hiring process. We're looking for a hands-on technical lead to lead a team of talented data scientists with an interest in dialog systems, natural language processing, textual analysis, and recommendation systems.

Responsibilities

• Lead and mentor a group of data scientists to tackle impactful problems such as Recommendation, Search Relevance, Knowledge Graph, etc. Your efforts will critically impact the growth of Sense’s Talent Management Platform.
• Analyse datasets with traditional and modern data science techniques
• Design new models and algorithms and develop proof-of-concept implementations
• Support executive leadership in developing Data Science & NLP strategy
• Keep up-to-date on advances in NLP
• Leverage deep technical knowledge and work across data science, product and engineering teams working together to accomplish extremely ambitious goals and build a great product.

Basic Qualifications

• 10+ years experience with building machine learning systems in a professional setting, with 3+ years specialisation in natural language processing
• Superb quantitative background (e.g. machine learning, statistics or computer science). Graduate degree required. Bias towards action and impact – able to structure a project from idea, prototyping, productionization to impact quantification. Industry experience with a proven track record of delivering impactful results preferred.
• Prior team-lead or manager experience. You’ll be leading and will have the opportunity to build, scale and nourish a team of experienced professionals.
• Advanced quantitative degree (Master and above)
• Hardworking and attentive self-starter, great communicator, amazing follow-through – you have a great work ethic and love the responsibility of being held accountable for the results.
• Strong understanding of LLMs and their building blocks
• Familiarity with orchestration tools (LangChain, LangGraph, LlamaIndex, CrewAI)
• Strong understanding of Prompt Engineering
• Experience with Generative AI frameworks & LLMs (GPT-5, Claude, LLaMA, Gemini, etc.)
• Vector databases (FAISS, Pinecone, Chroma) and indexing strategies
• API/service development (FastAPI, Flask, Docker, REST) + DBs (SQL, NoSQL, Redis)
• Cloud AI/ML skills (AWS SageMaker, Bedrock, S3, Lambda / GCP / Azure)

Preferred Qualifications

• Prior research or industry experience in the Recommender Systems (RecSys), Personalization, Search Relevance, Information Retrieval (IR), Deep Learning, Reinforcement Learning or Natural Language Processing (NLP) preferred.
• Advanced quantitative degree (PhD)
• Previous software engineering background is a plus.
• Familiarity with cloud platforms (AWS, Google Cloud Platform)
• MLOps - containerization (Docker), orchestration (K8s), CI/CD pipelines
• Familiarity with technical tools such as Keras/Tensorflow/PyTorch and Hive/Spark.
• Understanding of Ethical AI practices, AI governance, reproducible pipelines

Additional Information Perks & Benefits

• Equity
• Medical insurance for employees and dependents
• Quarterly Professional Development allowance
• Company Wellness Days (On months without holidays, you are still given a 3-day weekend) Sense is an equal-opportunity employer. We believe that diversity, inclusion, and belonging are integral to our success and do not discriminate based on race, color, religion, age, or any other basis protected by law. All your information will be kept confidential according to EEO guidelines.