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AI Session-Based Recommendation Model Developer

Aaliyah Okafor

Full-time · Job · New_York

About the role

Session-based recommendation addresses the cold-start limitation of collaborative filtering: when a new user arrives or an existing user starts a fresh session without clear long-term profile signals, what should you recommend? Session-based models work from the sequence of interactions within the current session — the items browsed, the dwell time on each, the search queries, the content abandoned — to infer immediate intent and surface the next most relevant item without needing historical data. Our personalization platform serves 60 media and e-commerce clients with 85 million monthly active users. Session-based recommendation is the capability that matters most for acquisition traffic: visitors arriving from paid search or social media arrive without browsing history, and the recommendation quality for those users directly affects conversion rate. Our current real-time layer relies on collaborative filtering signals that fail for new sessions. You'll lead session-based recommendation model development: designing transformer-based architectures that model within-session interaction sequences, implementing hybrid approaches that combine session signals with available long-term profile context, and building the serving infrastructure that delivers personalized recommendations under 50ms latency constraints for first-time sessions.

Responsibilities

  • Design transformer-based session recommendation architectures modeling within-session interaction sequences
  • Implement hybrid models combining real-time session signals with available long-term profile context
  • Build session intent inference identifying whether a session is in browse, compare, or purchase mode
  • Develop cold-start handling for users with zero interaction history before current session
  • Create serving infrastructure delivering session recommendations under 50ms latency
  • Monitor session recommendation lift against non-personalized fallbacks as primary quality metric

Requirements

  • 6+ years in recommender systems or ML engineering with session modeling or sequential recommendation experience
  • Deep understanding of attention-based sequence models and their application to recommendation
  • Strong Python and PyTorch skills with real-time ML serving at scale
  • Experience with cold-start recommendation strategies and new user acquisition traffic
  • Track record demonstrating measurable recommendation quality improvements on cold-start cohorts

Benefits

  • Fully remote with flexible schedule
  • Comprehensive health benefits
  • $4,000 annual professional development budget
  • Equity participation
  • Performance bonus tied to conversion lift metrics

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Job Type

Full-time

Level

Senior

Language

English

Salary Range

$130k – $160k / year

AI Expertise

AI Product & Strategy data science & analytics

Skills

python pytorch sql pandas statistics fastapi

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