VP of AI Search & Recommendations

Job description

Recognized as the No. 1 site trusted by real estate professionals, Realtor.com® 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, Realtor.com® 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 Realtor.com.

Your mandate: make our AI search & discovery experience the most trusted, most relevant, and fastest path to the right home—and do it at public-company scale.

As VP of Engineering, AI Search & Discovery, you’ll lead a multidisciplinary organization across AI Search Engineering, Relevance/Ranking, Query Understanding, Personalization, and ML Platforms, partnering tightly with Product, Data, and Revenue to move the company’s most important customer and business metrics.

This is a hands-on VP role: you’ll define the strategy, shape the architecture, hire and develop the leaders, and hold a very high bar on execution, reliability, and measurable outcomes.

**What You'll Do**

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.

**What You’ll Bring**

+ 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).

**What You’ll Own**

+ Core Search (indexing, retrieval, query understanding)
+ Ranking & Relevance Science (features, models, re-ranking, guardrails)
+ Personalization (session/user modeling, eligibility, privacy-aware features)
+ Evaluation & Experimentation (offline/online, human-in-the-loop)
+ ML/Inference Platform for search use-cases (latency-critical APIs, feature store)
+ Quality & Integrity (spam/fraud/abuse defenses; content quality signals)

**12-month Outcomes that Define Success**

+ Quality: Meaningful gains in nDCG/ERR and conversion/lead quality; improved first-result time and P95 latency on key surfaces.
+ Velocity: 2–3× increase in experiment throughput; reliable weekly relevance drops with automated evaluation.
+ Platform: Real-time re-ranking and feature pipeline in place; safe & measurable GenAI integrations where they outperform baselines.
+ Engineering Organization: Fully staffed leadership bench; clear succession and hiring plan; healthy engagement and retention.
+ Operational excellence: SLOs met, sharp incident posture, and a cost curve that bends the right way.

Do the best work of your life at Realtor.com®

Here, you’ll partner with a diverse team of experts as you use leading-edge tech to empower everyone to meet a crucial goal: finding their way home.

And you’ll find your way home too.

At Realtor.com®, you’ll bring your full self to work as you innovate with speed, serve our consumers, and champion your teammates.

In return, we’ll provide you with a warm, welcoming, and inclusive culture; intellectual challenges; and the development opportunities you need to grow.

Diversity is important to us, therefore, Realtor.com® is an Equal Opportunity Employer regardless of age, color, national origin, race, religion, creed, gender, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity and/or expression, marital status, status as a disabled veteran and/or veteran of the Vietnam Era or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local law.

In addition, Realtor.com® will provide reasonable accommodations for otherwise qualified disabled individuals.

Required Skill Profession

Other General