Senior Applied Data Scientist, Retrieval and Semantic Systems

Instructure

Senior Applied Data Scientist responsible for building AI-powered retrieval systems for Instructure's education technology. Collaborating with teams to design and enhance AI product capabilities.

Posted 6/3/2026full-timeBudapest • 🇭🇺 HungarySeniorWebsite

Tech Stack

Tools & technologies

Python

About the role

Key responsibilities & impact

Design, build, and ship production retrieval systems that power AI product capabilities across multiple products
Own vector store selection and operation, including scalability, latency, reliability, cost, and multi-tenant design
Build and operate indexing and refresh pipelines: chunking, embedding generation, backfills, deletes, and versioned indices
Implement semantic and hybrid retrieval: embeddings, similarity search, lexical and vector combination, metadata filtering, and reranking
Own retrieval evaluation as a first-class system: gold sets, offline relevance metrics, slice analysis, drift detection, and regression gates that block bad changes from shipping
Make and defend the core tradeoffs of the domain: relevance against latency against cost against operational complexity
Partner with AI Platform and infrastructure engineers on deployment, observability, and reliability, and with product and research partners on relevance requirements

Requirements

What you’ll need

6+ years of experience building and shipping production machine learning or applied AI systems
Proven ownership of a retrieval system in production, including vector store selection and operation
Strong Python skills and experience building services and APIs (for example, FastAPI or similar)
Solid grounding in embeddings, approximate nearest neighbor search, and retrieval and ranking systems
Experience designing indexing and refresh strategies, with data quality controls and safe backfills
Demonstrated ability to define and run retrieval evaluation: building gold sets, choosing relevance metrics, analyzing failures by slice, and preventing regressions
Strong tradeoff judgment across relevance, latency, cost, and operational complexity

Benefits

Comp & perks

Competitive compensation, plus all full-time employees participate in our ownership program - because everyone should have a stake in our success.
Flexible work culture. Our remote, hybrid and in-office collaboration spaces vary by role, team and location.
Generous time off, including local holidays and our annual “Dim the Lights” period in late December, when teams are encouraged to step back and recharge based on departmental needs.
Comprehensive wellness programs and mental health support
Learning and development resources, including professional development tools and tuition reimbursement, to support your growth
The technology and tools you need to do your best work
Motivosity employee recognition program
A culture rooted in inclusivity, support, and meaningful connection

ATS Keywords

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Applicant Tracking System Keywords

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Hard Skills & Tools

Pythonmachine learningapplied AIretrieval systemsembeddingsapproximate nearest neighbor searchindexing strategiesretrieval evaluationAPIsFastAPI

Soft Skills

ownershiptradeoff judgmentanalytical skillscollaborationcommunication