Data Scientist Expert - Search

How do you make our customers happy?

On busy days, our customers use our search engine over 4 million times. Not only does this mean that we have 4 million opportunities to show our customers the products that they are looking for, but we also have data of 4 million search journeys per day. That data is invaluable in making sure our search engine works to the best of its capabilities. We do this by returning the most relevant search results, but also through offering customers the tools they need to search in the most effective way possible. Tools such as search suggestions, filters and recommendations. All these need to be served with the lowest latency possible.

Ultimately, we want to leverage our data to not only understand the needs of our customers but to anticipate them ahead of time. Are you ready to leverage the power of data science to improve the search journey of our customers?

The biggest challenges

Search is constantly evolving. Our catalogue changes, our customers change, and their expectations change. But technology marches on as well, with new and exciting developments on GenAI making new things possible almost every day. All of this results in an awesome challenge to continuously improve our algorithms and look for new and exciting opportunities to surpass the expectations of our customers as they search our shop! From the moment they start their search journey we need to show them that we understand them and their needs by giving them the correct guidance, products and ranking.

Your responsibilities

As a data scientist in the Help Me Find product your main responsibility is to understand our customers’ needs through our vast amount of data and leverage machine learning models to help our customers in the best way possible. We expect you to have a firm grasp of data science basics and to have built several successful machine learning models. Additionally, substantial knowledge of Natural Language Processing, Information Retrieval and recommender systems is highly preferred.

Getting your machine learning models to production and maintaining them properly will also be one of your key responsibilities. This comes with its own MLOps challenges that we expect you to be aware of and have experience in. This does not mean you have to do everything by yourself. We work in multidisciplinary teams with skilled software engineers that are there to help you get your model to production in a scalable way. However, we expect you to be familiar with the best practices of software engineering to ensure that the collaboration can be as smooth as possible. As such, extensive experience with Python is a must and if you are familiar with Java or Kotlin that is a big added bonus.

Finally, at Help Me Find it is very important that we keep on improving our understanding of how our customers use our search functionality. We therefore expect that you are not afraid to work with our product analysts to get your hands dirty with the data. Using this data, you create analyses and insights that fuel your own understanding of how our customers interact with our search functionality and search results. And equally important: you are able to convey these insights to a wider audience by taking your team and the product leadership along with your findings and what they mean in terms of possible solutions.

The types of challenges that you might work on:

• How can we learn from past interactions of users to re-order our search results (machine-learning ranking and personalization)?
• How can we incorporate new modalities into our search journey (e.g. visual search)?
• How can we offer our customers the best possible filters and recommendations to make their search journey even smoother?
• What is the best possible composition of the search results page and how can we adapt this to each customer’s personal needs?

This job is not for you if:

• You would rather work on your own. You prefer to keep your cards close to your chest and don’t keep people in the loop.
• You like complexity. You would rather use the latest and shiniest technology than go for the best solution.
• Gigabytes of data scare you. You have mostly been working with neat csv files with clean data.

This job is for you if:

• You like a challenge. You are not daunted by the complexities of making a good search and have lots of ideas to keep on improving.
• An experimental mindset. You are a pro at using data to find out how things work and to inspire you to validate and improve the system.
• Getting to PRO is your priority. You don’t shy away from the engineering part of data science and always keep the final implementation in mind.

Where you will work

At one of the best-known online retail tech platforms in the Netherlands and Belgium. A platform where roughly 13 million customers can choose from over 41 million articles. A platform that helps about 49,000 commercial partners run their businesses. And a platform that will never be finished because bol.com has been reinventing retail since 1999 and has every intention of continuing that trend. If there’s a better way to do something, we’re on it! Together with our customers, partners, and over 3,000 colleagues.

You will work in the product ‘Help Me Find’, part of our Consumer Engagement domain. Help Me Find is responsible for everything related to our shop’s search functionality in web and apps.

As a key element in many customer’s journeys, Help Me Find is at the center of several strategic company objectives for 2025 and beyond. As such, we are expanding our product teams and are looking to innovate and leverage our data in even smarter ways than before. If this sounds like a fun challenge, then apply for this job asap!