Senior Data Scientist

Recognized as the No. 1 site trusted by real estate professionals, Realtor.com® has been at the forefront of online real estate for over 25 years, connecting buyers, sellers, and renters with trusted insights and expert guidance to find their perfect home. Through its robust suite of tools, Realtor.com® not only makes a significant impact on the real estate industry at large, but for consumers, navigating the biggest purchase they will make in their life, by providing a user experience that is easy to use, easy to understand, and most of all, easy to make decisions.

Join us on our mission to empower more people to find their way home by breaking barriers to entry, making the right connections, and building confidence through expert guidance.

About the Role

As a Senior Data Scientist on our Search & Algorithms team, you'll own NLP analytics for our next-generation semantic search experiences. You'll apply NLP and LLM-based techniques to a proprietary corpus of millions of real consumer search interactions—extracting signals like buyer vs. seller intent and conversational patterns to improve how our models rank and personalize results. You'll also prototype data products that turn those signals into features product and engineering can ship. This is an AI-native role: LLM evaluation tooling and AI-assisted workflows are core to how you'll work, not afterthoughts.

Top Reasons to Apply

• Industry-Leading AI and Modern Tech Stack: The company is recognized by vendors as a top-tier leader in AI adoption. You will actively champion AI-enabled reporting and work with a cutting-edge stack that includes Python, SQL, Tableau, Amplitude, dbt, Airflow, and advanced tools like Streamlit, MCP, and Windsurf.

• High-Maturity Data Culture: If you care about data quality and maturity, this team champions it at scale. You will have the resources and organizational buy-in to improve tracking, build scalable ETL pipelines, and establish data integrity across the entire company.

What You'll Do

• Measure and evaluate semantic search models using NLP and LLM-based evaluation frameworks on real user queries—surfacing buyer vs. seller context, exploration vs. transaction signals, and conversational patterns that inform ranking and personalization.

• Prototype data products that leverage conversational query data and behavioral signals to drive personalized search experiences, translating NLP insights into actionable features for product and engineering teams.

• Design tests for search model changes; define primary and guardrail metrics; communicate results clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

• Instrument and analyze conversational AI data using LLM observability and evaluation tooling—tracking model outputs, scoring response quality, and surfacing patterns across large volumes of AI-generated interactions to inform model and product improvements.

• Partner with search product and engineering leadership to define success metrics, shape the analytics roadmap for search, and present findings to senior leadership.

• Work in an AI-native way: apply agentic AI workflows, LLM APIs, and AI-assisted development to accelerate your work and help set the standard for how our team uses AI. Actively evaluate and adopt new tooling as the space evolves.

What You'll Bring

• 5+ years in data science, with 2+ years focused on NLP, text analytics, or search analytics.

• Hands-on NLP experience: query classification, intent detection, semantic similarity, entity extraction, or LLM-based evaluation.

• Strong Python skills and proficiency with NLP libraries (Hugging Face, spaCy, scikit-learn, or similar).

• Experience analyzing conversational and LLM-generated data using observability or evaluation tooling (e.g., Langfuse, Braintrust, or similar platforms for tracing, scoring, and evaluating AI outputs).

• Robust SQL skills and comfort working with large-scale clickstream or query log datasets.

• Solid experimentation fundamentals: A/B testing, power analysis, and statistical inference.

• Ability to build rapid prototypes and translate analytical findings into product-ready recommendations.

• Excellent communication skills—able to present NLP and AI concepts clearly to product and executive stakeholders.

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Statistics, Linguistics, Information Science, or a related field.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with search ranking analytics, query log analysis, or information retrieval measurement.

• Hands-on experience with LLM APIs (OpenAI, Claude, Gemini, or similar) and prompt engineering for evaluation, scoring, or analytical tasks.

• Experience working with LLM observability platforms (Langfuse, Braintrust, or similar) to instrument, trace, and evaluate AI product performance at scale.

• Prior work in consumer-facing search products or two-sided marketplace analytics.

• Experience with Snowflake or similar cloud data warehouses.

• Ph.D. in Computer Science, Computational Linguistics, NLP, or a related field.

How We Work:

We balance creativity and innovation on a foundation of in-person collaboration. For most roles, our employees work three or more days in our offices, where they have the opportunity to collaborate in-person, adding richness to our culture and knitting us closer together.

How We Reward You:

Realtor.com is committed to investing in the health and wellbeing of our employees and their families. Our benefits programs include, but are not limited to:

• Inclusive and Competitive medical, Rx, dental, and vision coverage

• Family forming benefits

• 13 Paid Holidays

• Flexible Time Off

• 8 hours of paid Volunteer Time off

• Immediate eligibility into Company 401(k) plan with 3.5% company match

• Tuition Reimbursement program for degreed and non-degreed programs

• 1:1 personalized Financial Planning Sessions

• Student Debt Retirement Savings Match program

• Free snacks and refreshments in each office location

Do the best work of your life at Realtor.com®

Here, you’ll partner with a diverse team of experts as you use leading-edge tech to empower everyone to meet a crucial goal: finding their way home. And you’ll find your way home too. At Realtor.com®, you’ll bring your full self to work as you innovate with speed, serve our consumers, and champion your teammates. In return, we’ll provide you with a warm, welcoming, and inclusive culture; intellectual challenges; and the development opportunities you need to grow.

Diversity is important to us, therefore, Realtor.com® is an Equal Opportunity Employer regardless of age, color, national origin, race, religion, creed, gender, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity and/or expression, marital status, status as a disabled veteran and/or veteran of the Vietnam Era or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local law. In addition, Realtor.com® will provide reasonable accommodations for otherwise qualified disabled individuals.