Data Scientist II (Remote)

Role Specific Information

Job Description

About the Role

In this role you will work with a data science team and cross-functional partners to solve business challenges and promote data-driven decision making with advanced data analysis and machine learning.

What You’ll Do

• Lead exploratory data analysis to cull actionable insights

• Collaborate with stakeholders to understand business requirements and translate them into technical solutions

• Develop and implement statistical and machine learning models 

• Fine-tune, optimize and ensure the scalability of models and algorithms

• Aid in designing experiments to answer targeted questions

• Identify and drive continuous improvement of key business metrics in an assigned business functional area

• Drive adoption and usage of data science products and models

• Translate data science outputs into business outcomes and value delivered

• Mentor and guide junior data scientists, providing technical expertise and fostering a culture of continuous learning and development

• Stay up to date on the latest trends and developments in data science and technology and identify implementation opportunities to support innovation at Kohl’s

• Additional tasks may be assigned

Addendum

PERSONALIZATION & RECOMMENDATION SYSTEMS

Accountabilities

• Design and support deployment of machine learning models to power personalized experiences across digital channels (e.g., homepage, PDP, cart, campaigns)

• Build and optimize recommendation and ranking systems balancing relevance, discovery, and business objectives (e.g., conversion, revenue)

• Develop multi-stage ranking approaches, including candidate generation and re-ranking

• Address cold-start and long-tail challenges in large product catalogs

• Partner with engineering to support real-time personalization and scalable deployment

Skills & Experience

• Experience with recommendation systems, search, or ranking problems at scale of millions of customers and products

• Experience in developing sequential, transformer models and utilizing LLM models in production

• Understanding of collaborative filtering and learning-to-rank methods

• Experience optimizing models for GPU / distributed training

• Familiarity with large-scale datasets and production ML systems

• Exposure to real-time or low-latency serving environments

• Experience with vector search / ANN methods (e.g., FAISS, ScaNN) preferred

• Experience with delivering end to end customized ML models in production environment

Required

• Bachelor’s Degree in Data Science, Computer Science, Statistics, Applied Mathematics or equivalent quantitative field

• 3+ years of progressively complex data science experience

• Extensive experience developing and deploying state-of-the-art algorithms using machine learning, statistical and optimization methods 

• Expert in using modern analytics tools, programming languages, and cloud platforms (Python, R, Spark, SQL, GCP, etc.)

• Strong problem-solving skills with an emphasis on product development

• Experience proposing rapid experiments to test the effectiveness of new strategies or initiatives and iterating quickly

• Effective communication and collaboration skills at all levels 

Preferred

• Master’s degree and/or Ph.D.

• Retail and Logistics experience

• Supply chain management

• Marketing models

Essential Functions

The requirements listed below are representative of functions you will be required to perform, however you may be required to perform additional functions. Kohl’s may revise this job description at any time. To perform this job successfully, you must be able to perform each essential function satisfactorily. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions, absent undue hardship.

• Ability to perform the accountabilities listed in the “What You’ll Do” Section

• Ability to comply with dress code requirements

• Basic math and reading skills, legible handwriting, and basic computer operation

• Ability to maintain prompt and regular attendance and meet scheduling requirements as set by the company

• Ability to learn and comply with all company policies, procedures, standards and guidelines

• Ability to receive, understand and proactively respond to direction from leadership and other company personnel

• Ability to work as part of a team and interact effectively and appropriately with others

• Ability to maintain composure and work in a fast paced environment while accomplishing multiple tasks within established timeframes

• Ability to satisfactorily complete company training programs

• Ability to use a personal computer for tasks such as communicating, preparing reports, etc.

• Ability to plan, prioritize and monitor activities across business units

• Ability to complete or oversee the completion of assigned projects in a timely manner