Lead Data Scientist - Search & Recommendation

About the role

This role sits on the Search and Recommendations Platform team, where you will serve as an algorithm specialist helping shape the intelligence behind GoFood and GoPay. You will work with high-calibre colleagues across Singapore, China, Indonesia, and India to build search, recommendation, and monetisation models that support on-demand and financial products across Indonesia.

In your first six months, you will help launch core platform capabilities and partner with business-facing data science teams to create measurable business value while improving the user experience.

If you enjoy using advanced algorithms to deliver tangible business outcomes, this position offers a high level of impact and visibility.

Key responsibilities

• Develop and refine hybrid retrieval systems that combine lexical and semantic approaches, including BM25, dense vector search, HNSW/LSH, and generative retrieval, to raise precision and recall across GoFood and GoPay surfaces.
• Create strong embeddings and relevance features that reflect user intent, cuisine and dish meaning, geolocation, delivery limitations, price sensitivity, and promotional context.
• Design multi-task deep ranking models that optimise for conversion, diversity, merchant quality, and long-term retention, while using live inputs such as promotions, surge, and stock status.
• Build personalised ranking layers and behavioural models using historical orders, user preferences, and context-aware signals.
• Design recommendation systems with collaborative filtering, graph methods, and sequence models to broaden retrieval, including Q2Q2I, Q2I2I, and U2I use cases, as well as cold-start merchants and newly introduced dishes.
• Improve embedding quality for multimodal inputs such as text, images, and behavioural signals, and apply LLMs to enrich structured knowledge such as taxonomy labels, dish characteristics, and dietary tags.
• Use structured metadata, taxonomy data, and knowledge-graph features within retrieval and ranking pipelines to strengthen semantic accuracy and consistency.

Requirements

• A master’s degree or above in Computer Science, Machine Learning, NLP, Computer Vision, or a related discipline.
• Strong coding ability in Python, C++, or Java.
• Proven experience building large-scale ranking or recommendation systems for consumer-facing products such as ecommerce, food delivery, ridesharing, advertising, streaming, or social platforms.
• Working knowledge of LLMs and/or large language and vision models, with the ability to integrate them into search or recommendation workflows considered a strong advantage.
• Evidence of introducing new algorithms or tools that created measurable outcomes, especially through the use of LLMs or LLVMs in search or recommendation modelling.
• Strong product sense and the ability to interpret user behaviour data and traffic trends.
• Clear English communication skills, both written and spoken; understanding Bahasa Indonesia is an added advantage.
• A self-driven, inquisitive mindset with enthusiasm for building high-impact systems quickly.

About the team

The team consists of algorithm specialists and engineers across Singapore, China, Indonesia, and India. Together, they develop the core search and recommendation platform capabilities that support a wide range of use cases across the GoTo ecosystem.

The group values action, experimentation, and practical deployment. Members collaborate openly, question ideas constructively, and help each other create systems that improve ranking accuracy, scale LLM-powered retrieval, and personalise customer journeys.

Additional information

The hiring process may involve artificial intelligence tools to support tasks such as application screening, resume analysis, or response evaluation. These tools assist the recruitment team and do not replace human decision-making. Final hiring decisions are made by people. If you want more information about how your data is handled, you may contact the company.