VP of AI Search & Recommendations

Overview

Recognized as the No. 1 site trusted by real estate professionals, ® has been at the forefront of online real estate for over 25 years, connecting buyers, sellers, and renters with trusted insights and expert guidance to find their perfect home. Through its robust suite of tools, ® not only makes a significant impact on the real estate industry at large, but for consumers, navigating the biggest purchase they will make in their life, by providing a user experience that is easy to use, easy to understand, and most of all, easy to make decisions.

Join us on our mission to empower more people to find their way home by breaking barriers to entry, making the right connections, and building confidence through expert guidance.

Search is the front door to

• Set the bar and the direction
  • Own the 3 year technical strategy for AI search, discovery, and recommendations; align it to company OKRs and News Corp governance.
  • Establish a metrics-first culture: nDCG/ERR, CTR, lead quality, P50/P95 latency, experiment velocity, and infra cost per search.
• Build & lead a world-class engineering organization
  • Lead the team across core search, ranking, query understanding, personalization, and ML platform; grow and coach an org spanning software engineers, relevance scientists, and ML engineers.
  • Raise the talent bar: recruit senior technical leaders and principal-level ICs; set clear career paths and performance standards.
• Own the search stack end-to-end
  • Retrieval & indexing: hybrid vector + semantic, data quality, dedupe, freshness, and geo/local considerations.
  • Ranking: multi-objective LTR (relevance, quality, monetization), session & user modeling, cold-start handling for new listings, image and text quality signals, and advanced re-ranking (including LLM-assisted ranking where it wins).
  • Query understanding: intents, entities, spell-correction, reformulation, facets, structured constraints, ambiguity resolution for neighborhoods/communities.
  • Personalization: embeddings & features, eligibility/guardrails, unbiased evaluation, and robust online/offline experimentation pipelines.
  • Evaluation & experimentation: offline suites, interleaving, online A/B, sequential testing; ship improvements continuously with safety rails.
• Modernize the platform
  • Shape our ML & inference platform for low-latency ranking and re-ranking
  • Partner with platform teams on SLOs, cost, capacity planning, observability, and incident response (you’ll expect clean postmortems and durable fixes).
  • Advance pragmatic GenAI: RAG for search assistance, answer synthesis with citations, robust eval harnesses (task-specific metrics, human-in-the-loop), and cost/perf optimization.
• Operate with rigor at a public company
  • Work with Legal/Privacy/Compliance on MLS data obligations, Fair Housing considerations, and AI governance; ensure robots/agents compliance and abuse/spam defenses.
  • Communicate with executive leadership and, when needed, Boards/partners; convert complex trade-offs into crisp, defensible decisions.

• Proven scale:
  You’ve led search/recommendation systems serving tens of millions of users or equivalent high-stakes marketplaces, with measurable lifts in relevance and revenue.
• Depth in search & ML: 12+ years in large-scale search/recommendation, including hybrid retrieval, learning-to-rank, user modeling, and evaluation. You’ve shipped multi-objective ranking safely in production.
• GenAI pragmatism:
  Hands-on leadership integrating LLMs where they improve outcomes (e.g., re-ranking, query reformulation, answer synthesis) with strong offline/online evaluation discipline.
• Platform and operations chops:
  Real-time inference, feature stores, streaming data, strong SRE partnership, and a habit of designing for latency, reliability, and cost.
• People & org leadership:
  Built and scaled multi-disciplinary teams; hired/developed Directors and Principals; set culture, strategy, and execution cadence.
• Executive communication:
  Clear storyteller able to align product, design, science, finance, legal, and revenue stakeholders on trade-offs and timelines.
• Austin presence:
  Willing and able to work onsite at our Austin HQ (relocation required to make Austin…