Director of Applied AI & Machine Learning

About the role

Thrive Market is looking for a Director of Applied AI & Machine Learning to lead the company's ML organization. Thrive Market exists to make healthy and sustainable living easy and affordable. That mission is fundamentally a personalization problem, connecting the right member with the right products, at the right moment, in a way that builds lasting habits and loyalty. Machine learning is the most powerful tool available to solve that problem at scale. This role sits at the intersection of applied science, engineering, and product strategy. Thrive Market is moving toward a dynamic layout architecture. Rather than relying on static templates and generic carousels, the vision is for every member to see a personalized storefront; product recommendations, search results, promotions, and content all dynamically assembled by ML-powered systems. This leader will be the driving force behind making that vision a reality. You will lead a team of Senior Data Scientists and also a group of cross-functional engineers to deliver ML-assisted shopping from ML model to customer experiments. The vision is for models to move from development to live experiments in weeks rather than quarters. This role would oversee the hiring of multiple team members (Sr. Data Scientist, ML Data Engineer, Fullstack Engineer, Mobile Engineer). This is a hands-on leadership role: you will set the technical direction, build and scale the team, partner deeply with Product, Engineering, and business stakeholders, and ensure ML is embedded across the platform, not siloed as a service function.