Senior Data Scientist – Information Retrieval & NLP - San Francisco, CA

Job Title: Senior Data Scientist – Information Retrieval & NLP

• Location: San Francisco, CA (Hybrid)
• Company: ZoomInfo
• Employment Type: Full-time

About ZoomInfo

ZoomInfo (NASDAQ: ZI) is a leading Go-To-Market (GTM) Intelligence Platform, powering faster business growth through AI-ready insights, trustworthy data, and advanced automation. With solutions adopted by over 35,000 companies worldwide, we help sales, marketing, and operations teams understand their customers and markets with unprecedented clarity.

We foster a culture of innovation, accountability, and collaboration—and we’re looking for people who want to thrive in an environment that rewards ownership and bold thinking.

Position Overview

We’re seeking a Senior Data Scientist – Information Retrieval & NLP to join our Applied AI team and build the next generation of high-performance, scalable information retrieval systems. You'll work on complex modeling initiatives including transformer-based architectures, named entity recognition (NER), large-scale entity resolution, and hybrid retrieval pipelines that drive business-critical applications used by millions.

This role is ideal for someone who is deeply technical, product-minded, and passionate about transforming massive datasets into intelligent, real-time insights.

What You'll Do

Information Retrieval & Modeling:

• Develop and deploy transformer/RAG architectures that accurately surface relevant contacts, companies, and insights.
• Optimize model performance through quantization, distillation, and fine-tuning to scale across petabyte-level data.
• Design hybrid dense/sparse search systems using vector databases like Pinecone, Weaviate, FAISS, or OpenSearch.

NER & Entity Resolution:

• Lead development of NER models tagging people, organizations, and domain-specific entities across multilingual text.
• Build scalable entity resolution systems to deduplicate and link hundreds of millions of records with sub-second latency, integrating knowledge-graph enrichment where applicable.

Experimentation & Metrics:

• Design and analyze large-scale A/B tests and back-testing experiments.
• Translate product needs into ML KPIs, and ensure learnings are applied to improve model and business outcomes.

Strategic & Cross-Functional Impact:

• Collaborate with product, engineering, and executive leadership to influence roadmap and investment decisions.
• Mentor junior team members and represent the team through internal documentation, public blogs, or conference presentations.

What You Bring

• Experience: 7+ years in ML/NLP roles (or 4+ post-Master’s/PhD), including successful deployment of at least two revenue-impacting products.
• Expertise: Proven knowledge of transformer models (BERT, GPT, T5), retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), vector-based IR, and performance optimization.
• Track Record: Experience with NER and large-scale entity resolution (100M+ records); knowledge graph expertise is a plus.
• Technical Proficiency: Strong hands-on skills in PyTorch or TensorFlow, Python; familiarity with Go/Java is a plus.
• MLOps & Infrastructure: Proficiency in MLOps tools and practices (Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, GitOps, feature stores, model registries, etc.).
• Communication: Ability to present complex technical concepts clearly to stakeholders at all levels, and to own both strategy and execution.

Compensation & Benefits

• Base Salary: $167,760 – $230,670 USD (based on experience and location)
• Additional Compensation: Bonus, equity, and comprehensive benefits package
• Benefits: Medical, dental, vision, 401k, wellness programs, parental leave, mental health support, and more

Apply Now

Are you ready to join a high-impact team that’s shaping the future of intelligent information retrieval at scale? Apply today and help power the next era of AI-driven insights at ZoomInfo.