Lead Data Scientist-Item Science

About Us:

As a Fortune 50 company with more than 400,000 team members worldwide, Target is an iconic brand and one of America's leading retailers.

Joining Target means promoting a culture of mutual care and respect and striving to make the most meaningful and positive impact. Becoming a Target team member means joining a community that values different voices and lifts each other up. Here, we believe your unique perspective is important, and you'll build relationships by being authentic and respectful.

Overview about TII:

At Target, we have a timeless purpose and a proven strategy. And that hasn’t happened by accident. Some of the best minds from different backgrounds come together at Target to redefine retail in an inclusive learning environment that values people and delivers world-class outcomes. That winning formula is especially apparent in Bengaluru, where Target in India operates as a fully integrated part of Target’s global team and has more than 4,000 team members supporting the company’s global strategy and operations.

Pyramid Overview:

A role with Target Data Science & Engineering means the chance to help develop and manage state of the art predictive algorithms that use data at scale to automate and optimize decisions at scale. Whether you join our Statistics, Optimization or Machine Learning teams, you’ll be challenged to harness Target’s impressive data breadth to build the algorithms that power solutions our partners in Marketing, Supply Chain Optimization, Network Security and Personalization rely on.

Team Overview:

Target Data Sciences is offering an exciting opportunity to solve high-impact AI/ML problems in the retail item ecosystem. The Item Science team is focused on building intelligent capabilities that improve how products are onboarded, enriched, validated, discovered, and experienced across Target’s digital and operational channels.
Item data is the foundation of retail. It powers product discovery, search relevance, recommendations, SEO, PDP quality, vendor onboarding, merchandising decisions, and guest confidence. As Target continues to scale its digital and marketplace capabilities, we are looking for driven and passionate individuals with strong AI engineering, machine learning, GenAI, and production systems experience to help build the next generation of item intelligence platforms.
If you are that person, you can expect to be involved in:

• Building scalable AI/ML capabilities for catalog management, item data quality, attribute enrichment, taxonomy prediction, and derived attributes.

  
  

• Developing and productionizing solutions across GenAI, LLMs, computer vision, classical ML, deep learning, and agentic AI workflows.

  
  

Position Overview:

As a Lead Data Scientist at Target, You will get an opportunity to design, develop, deploy and maintain data science models and tools. You’ll work closely with applied data scientists, data analysts and business partners to continuously learn and understand evolving business needs. You’ll also collaborate with AI/ML engineers and data scientists on peer teams to build and productionize groundbreaking GenAI based solutions for various teams.

Role Overview:

In this role as a Lead Data Scientist, you will:

• Analyze large datasets for insights leading to business process improvements or solution development.

  
  

• Contribute to the research, design, and implementation of leading-edge generative AI technologies to address and solve complex problems that contribute to finding solutions for the retail world.

  
  

• Work with Multimodal LLMs, enhance model performance, fine-tune LLMs

  
  

• Work with the team to build and maintain complex software systems and tools.

  
  

• Adopt modular architecture and good software development/engineering practices to enhance the overall product performance and guide other team members.

  
  

• Produce clean, efficient code based on specifications.

  
  

• Coordinate the analysis, troubleshooting and resolution of issues in the models and software.

  
  

About You:

• Bachelor’s/MS/PhD in Mathematics, Statistics, Computer Science, or other related fields.

  
  

• 8+ years of relevant experience; Ability to lead by example a group of Data Scientists.

  
  

• Strong analytical thinking; Ability to creatively solve business problems, innovative approaches where required.

  
  

• Ability to clean, transform, manipulate, and analyze large datasets for insights leading to business process improvements or solution development.

  
  

• Experience in developing, testing, and maintaining large codebases in a collaborative environment, while meeting industry best practices.

  
  

• Highly proficient in programming skills in Python, SQL, Hadoop/Hive.

  
  

• Exposure to programmatic use of GenAI/LLMs and related ecosystem.

  
  

• Experience in developing Deep Learning based solutions using PyTorch or TensorFlow

  
  

• Self-driven and results oriented. Willing to stretch to meet tight timelines.

  
  

• Strong team player with ability to collaborate eEectively across geographies/ time zones.

  
  

• Excellent written and verbal communication skills.

  
  

Preferred Qualifications:

• Knowledge of containerized solutions using Docker/ Kubernetes.

  
  

• Exposure to Prompt Engineering, Embedding Generation, Retrieval Augmented

  
  

• Generation(RAG) space (e.g., Vector DB, Elastic Search) will be plus.

  
  

• Knowledge of Computer Vision & Deep Learning Methods.

  
  

• Good working Knowledge of Mathematical and statistical concepts, optimization, data structures and algorithms, data analysis, visualizations, and applications of same in a variety of business problems.

  
  

• Experience deploying solutions with large-scale business impact in commercial

  
  

• settings.

  
  

Know More About Us here:

• Life at Target- https://india.target.com/

  
  

• Benefits- https://india.target.com/life-at-target/workplace/benefits

  
  

• Culture- https://india.target.com/life-at-target/belonging