Search - Principal Data Scientist

Job Description

Elastic is seeking a Principal Data Scientist to join its Search Data team. In this role, the individual will be responsible for developing and integrating statistical tools and machine learning models within the Search domain, focusing on semantic search, RAG, query understanding, and ranking and recommendations. The Principal Data Scientist will collaborate closely with Product teams to drive innovation and transform Elastic's AI/ML driven Search experiences, with an emphasis on bringing new ideas to production quickly.

What the role involves:

• Exploring, selecting, and benchmarking open source and Elastic proprietary models.
• Experimenting, evaluating, and testing use cases for Generative AI including RAG, chat and agentic search.
• Keeping up-to-date with the most significant recent developments in the field of NLP and information retrieval.
• Engaging with the NLP and information retrieval communities.
• Collaborating with cross-functional teams.
• Promoting knowledge sharing and collaboration.

Requirements:

• 8+ years of experience building and applying NLP to production use cases.
• 8+ years of professional software development experience in Python.
• Experience in Generative AI, Retrieval Augmented Generation, and information retrieval.
• Experience with libraries and frameworks such as PyTorch, transformers, and Pandas.
• Experience using collaborative notebook-based workflows (e.g., Jupyter) for prototyping and knowledge sharing.
• Expertise in AI/ML quality evaluation and improvement.
• Self-motivated, collaborative style, open communicator, experience in a distributed team.
• Good attention to detail and highly organized.
• Passion for data, analysis, and achieving excellence.

What Elastic offers:

• Competitive pay.
• Health coverage for you and your family in many locations.
• Flexible locations and schedules for many roles.
• Generous vacation days.
• Matching for financial donations and service.
• Parental leave.