Staff Applied Scientist, Search & Discovery

Material Bank is the world’s largest material marketplace for the architecture and design industry. Operating in 37 countries, our platform has become the standard for design professionals around the globe. Every day, Material Bank connects thousands of designers with tens of thousands of materials from leading brands. Material Bank is the fastest and most powerful way for design professionals to search, sample, and specify materials.

Material Bank is seeking a Staff Applied Scientist, Search & Discovery to help define the future of product discovery for the Architecture and Design industry. Designers don't simply search for products—they search for inspiration, aesthetics, performance, sustainability, availability, and project fit. Our opportunity is to create a discovery platform that understands intent, surfaces the right materials at the right moment, and helps members discover products they didn't even know to ask for. By combining world-class search science, behavioral intelligence, multimodal understanding, and modern AI, we're redefining how designers discover materials across the world's largest architecture and design marketplace.

This is a hands-on applied science role for someone who enjoys solving difficult, ambiguous problems. You won't inherit a mature discovery strategy with the answers already decided. Instead, you'll explore the data, prototype new approaches, validate them rigorously, and partner closely with Product and Engineering to bring successful ideas into production. As a technical expert, you'll help evaluate emerging technologies, guide architectural discussions, and provide recommendations on the approaches that best fit our business. You won't own every decision, but your expertise and research will help shape them.

Success in this role means members consistently find the right materials faster, discover products they otherwise wouldn't have considered, and increasingly rely on Material Bank as the smartest place to begin every material search. You'll be a trusted technical resource across the organization, bringing deep expertise in search, recommendations, and AI-driven discovery while helping teams turn research into measurable improvements for both our members and our business.

What You'll Do

• Research, prototype, and improve the technologies that power search, recommendations, and intelligent product discovery across the platform.
• Improve search retrieval, ranking, and relevance models so members quickly find the right materials while discovering products aligned to their project intent.
• Develop recommendation systems that incorporate member behavior, project context, visual preferences, material relationships, and design intent.
• Apply embeddings, vector search, foundation models, and LLMs to improve query understanding, semantic retrieval, conversational search, recommendation reasoning, and product explanations, while understanding where traditional search techniques remain the best solution.
• Advance multimodal product understanding by combining images, structured attributes, technical specifications, behavioral signals, and product content.
• Partner with Catalog, Product, and Data Engineering to improve metadata, taxonomy, attribution, and AI-assisted catalog enrichment.
• Analyze behavioral, catalog, and search interaction data to identify opportunities, validate hypotheses, and improve member discovery.
• Prototype, evaluate, and iterate on retrieval, ranking, recommendation, and AI approaches, then partner with Engineering to productionize successful solutions.
• Develop evaluation frameworks and experimentation methodologies for search relevance, recommendation quality, AI performance, and member engagement.
• Provide technical guidance on search, recommendations, and AI-driven discovery, contribute to architectural discussions, evaluate emerging technologies, and mentor others as appropriate.
• Collaborate with Product, Engineering, Data Engineering, Catalog, Design, and Brand teams to translate research into production capabilities.

What You'll Bring

• Proven experience building production search, recommendation, ranking, or personalization systems that delivered measurable business impact.
• Deep expertise in information retrieval, including retrieval, ranking, relevance, learning-to-rank, hybrid retrieval, semantic search, and recommendation systems.
• Experience applying modern AI techniques, including embeddings, vector search, multimodal AI, foundation models, and LLM-powered search or recommendation systems.
• Strong machine learning, statistical analysis, experimentation, and evaluation skills.
• Hands-on experience prototyping and implementing machine learning solutions using Python or similar languages.
• Experience deploying or partnering on production AI and machine learning systems.
• Strong understanding of catalog data, metadata, taxonomy, and attribution, and their impact on search and recommendation quality.
• Ability to provide technical leadership through expertise, influence architectural discussions, and mentor others without direct management responsibility.
• Excellent communication skills with the ability to collaborate effectively across Product, Engineering, Data, and Catalog teams.

What you’ll get from us:

• Our people: We are a growth-driven team that values efficiency, builds smart automation, operates in small empowered teams, and moves quickly from idea to execution.
• Relaxation and Celebrations: Flexible PTO, Sick Days, Paid National Holidays, and even more (ask us about this when we connect). 
• Health Benefits: We contribute to your medical, dental, vision and short-term/long-term disability plans and have a strong employee assistance program. 
• Plan for your Retirement: 401(k) eligible after your first 90 day's employed!
• Giving Back: We sponsor multiple events throughout the year to help out our communities. 
• Growth: We’ll help you take your career to the next level. We want you to be creative and take initiative which will allow you to grow and create within the company. Most importantly, be the best at what matters! 
• Flexible Work Schedules: With business units and employees across the globe, Material Technologies has embraced a hybrid  working model allowing department leaders to decide on the best approach for their respective teams, whether that be remote, in person, or a little of both.  

Material Bank is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We value diversity, and all applicants will be considered for employment without attention to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, national origin, veteran or disability status or other status protected under any applicable federal, state or local law.