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Realtor.com · 15 hours ago

VP of AI Search & Recommendations

Austin, Texas, United States

Full-time

Onsite

Director/Executive

12+ years exp

Realtor.com® is a leading online real estate platform that connects buyers, sellers, and renters with trusted insights and expert guidance. They are seeking a VP of AI Search & Recommendations to lead a multidisciplinary organization focused on AI search, ranking, and personalization, ensuring a high-quality user experience. The role involves defining strategy, shaping architecture, and leading a world-class engineering team to enhance the search and discovery experience.

PropTechReal EstateRental Property

H1B Sponsor Likely

Responsibilities

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

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

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

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

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

Qualification

AI Search EngineeringMachine Learning PlatformsRankingRelevance ScienceQuery UnderstandingPersonalization TechniquesGenAI IntegrationReal-time InferenceExperimentationEvaluationPeople LeadershipExecutive Communication

Required

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 your primary residence)

Benefits

Inclusive culture

Intellectual challenges

Development opportunities

Company

Realtor.com

Glassdoor3.4

Realtor.com is an online platform that allows users to search for real estate property records, houses, condos and lands. It is a sub-organization of Move.

Founded in 1996

Santa Clara, California, USA

1001-5000 employees

https://www.realtor.com/

H1B Sponsorship

Realtor.com has a track record of offering H1B sponsorships. Please note that this does not guarantee sponsorship for this specific role. Below presents additional info for your reference. (Data Powered by US Department of Labor)

Distribution of Different Job Fields Receiving Sponsorship

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Trends of Total Sponsorships

2025 (26)

2024 (62)

2023 (26)

2022 (83)

2021 (88)

2020 (52)