Machine Learning Scientist III - Customer Service AI

Who We Are Wayfair is seeking a high-impact Machine Learning Scientist III to lead the research, technical strategy, and production deployment of next-generation Generative AI and agentic systems for Wayfair’s Customer Service organization. In this role, you will bridge cutting-edge AI research and large-scale enterprise execution—architecting robust, multi-agent frameworks, proprietary domain-adapted LLMs, and end-to-end LLMOps infrastructure.

You will be responsible for defining technical roadmaps, tackling high-ambiguity customer service challenges, mentoring junior scientists, and collaborating closely with engineering and product leadership. Success requires deep technical mastery of NLP and Generative AI, a demonstrated track record of taking complex AI systems to production at scale, and the executive presence to turn emerging AI capabilities into measurable business ROI and customer lifetime value.

What You’ll Do Technical Leadership & Strategy: Help define the Generative AI roadmap and architecture for Customer Service Intelligence, identifying high-leverage opportunities to deploy agentic workflows, autonomous triage, and real-time agent copilot systems. Advanced Research & System Design: Architect, fine-tune, and evaluate state-of-the-art foundation models (parameter-efficient fine-tuning, RLHF/DPO, domain-adapted pretraining) and agentic frameworks (multi-agent coordination, tool-use, structured reasoning).

Enterprise-Scale Production & LLMOps: Partner with Engineering and Core Platform teams to drive end-to-end ML lifecycle standards—including robust CI/CD, scalable inference optimization (vLLM, TensorRT-LLM, model quantization), latency/throughput profiling, and automated governance/guardrails. Evaluation Frameworks & Governance: Design rigorous offline and online evaluation ecosystems (LLM-as-a-judge, custom benchmark datasets, semantic observability, red-teaming) to monitor factual consistency, safety, hallucination mitigation, and task completion in customer-facing workflows.

Cross-Functional Influence & Alignment: Serve as the technical authority across product managers, operations directors, legal/compliance, and engineering leaders, translating abstract business challenges into scalable technical implementations with defined ROI metrics. Mentorship & Engineering Excellence: Set high standards for experimental rigor and code quality across the team; lead design reviews, mentor mid-level and junior scientists, and foster a culture of rapid, scientifically sound prototyping.

Applied Innovation & Advocacy: Keep Wayfair at the cutting edge by tracking developments in foundation model architectures, context-caching, vector search, and reasoning models, proactively running proofs-of-concept to identify disruptive technology before it commoditizes. What You’ll Need Experience: Minimum 2+ years of experience with PhD, or 4+ years of industry experience with MS, or 6+ years of experience with a BS in a quantitative STEM field.

Track Record of Impact: Proven history of taking complex AI/ML systems from early-stage ambiguity through architecture and production delivery at scale, directly driving top-line or operational efficiency metrics. Generative AI & LLM Mastery: Deep expertise in transformer architectures, advanced Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) topologies (hybrid search, hierarchical retrieval, query rewriting), fine-tuning paradigms (LoRA, QLoRA, DPO/RLHF), and prompt-chaining/agentic frameworks (LangChain, LangGraph, LlamaIndex, AutoGen).

Software Engineering & Infrastructure: Expert-level software development skills in Python, with clean production code standards, asynchronous programming, containerization (Docker, Kubernetes), distributed training/inference, and modern cloud ML infrastructure (GCP Vertex AI, AWS SageMaker, Azure AI). Production LLMOps & Guardrails: Hands-on experience architecting production-grade LLM monitoring pipelines—encompassing semantic caching, rate limiting, latency budgeting, cost tracking, drift detection, and safety/security filtering (PII masking, prompt injection defense).

System Design & Communication: Exceptional systems-thinking and stakeholder communication skills, capable of influencing senior cross-functional leadership, defending trade-offs in technical design reviews, and explaining complex AI mechanics to non-technical partners. High-Value Differentiators Experience with agentic AI systems and LLMOps principles for model lifecycle management, performance evaluation, and automated testing.

A PhD in AI or a strong publication record in top conferences and journals Assistance for Individuals with Disabilities Wayfair is fully committed to providing equal opportunities for all individuals, including individuals with disabilities. As part of this commitment, Wayfair will make reasonable accommodations to the known physical or mental limitations of qualified individuals with disabilities, unless doing so would impose an undue hardship on business operations.

If you require a reasonable accommodation to participate in the job application or interview process, please let us know by completing our Accomodations for Applicants form . Need Technical Assistance? For more information about applying for a career at wayfair, visit our FAQ page here . About Wayfair Inc. Wayfair is one of the world’s largest online destinations for the home. Whether you work in our global headquarters in Boston, or in our warehouses or offices throughout the world, we’re reinventing the way people shop for their homes.

Through our commitment to industry-leading technology and creative problem-solving, we are confident that Wayfair will be home to the most rewarding work of your career. If you’re looking for rapid growth, constant learning, and dynamic challenges, then you’ll find that amazing career opportunities are knocking. No matter who you are, Wayfair is a place you can call home. We’re a community of innovators, risk-takers, and trailblazers who celebrate our differences, and know that our unique perspectives make us stronger, smarter, and well-positioned for success.

We value and rely on the collective voices of our employees, customers, community, and suppliers to help guide us as we build a better Wayfair – and world – for all. Every voice, every perspective matters. That’s why we’re proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, ethnicity, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship status, marital status, disability, gender identity, gender expression, veteran status, genetic information, or any other legally protected characteristic.

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