Staff Data Scientist

We're REA

With bold and ambitious goals, REA Group is changing the way the world experiences property. No matter where you're at on your property journey, we're here to help with every step - whether that's finding or financing your next home.

Our people are the key to our success. At the heart of everything we do, is a thriving culture centred around high performance and care. We are purpose driven and collaborative, which drives innovation and our ability to make a real impact. As such, we’re proud to have been named in Australia’s “Top 5” Best Workplaces two years in a row, as well as being recognised as a Best Workplace for Women.

Where the team fits in

The team sits within the

• au tribe, part of the broader Consumer Product group, headed up by our Executive General Manager. We are creating new products and solutions that will impact how Australians experience property, today and into the future. Today,
• au is Australia’s 3rd largest property site and allows buyers and sellers to research 10 million+ properties, regardless of whether they’re currently advertised for sale. Navigating the property market is complex and can be overwhelming, there are many opportunities to improve the buying and selling journey for Australians.

This is a unique opportunity to help shape a product from its foundational AI capabilities. As our Staff Data Scientist, you will be instrumental in designing and implementing the intelligent core of our platform. You'll tackle complex challenges in Natural Language Understanding (NLU), recommendation and ranking systems, semantic search, and personalization, directly impacting millions of users by helping them discover properties in ways they never thought possible. If you're passionate about using AI to solve real-world problems and want to redefine an entire industry, this role is for you.

What the role is all about

• Support strategy and development - Applying advanced NLP and Information Retrieval techniques to design intelligent search experiences that blend semantic, lexical, and hybrid methods.
• Understand user intent and meaning – Leveraging industry best practice to enhance multi-modal query understanding, result summarisation, and search relevance in large-scale, real-time systems.
• Support data exploration and enrichment - Analysing search logs, user queries, and engagement signals to uncover patterns and drive data-informed relevance improvements.
• Hyper-personalised ranking and retrieval – explore and spike solutions for indexing, retrieval, ranking, and re-ranking using offline metrics, human judgement, and online experimentation (e.g. A / B tests).
• Guidance and insights - Translating complex modelling outcomes into clear, actionable insights for product, engineering, and design stakeholders.
• Research and innovation - Experimenting with the latest tools, embeddings, LLMs, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) techniques to unlock new search capabilities.
• Passionate about results - Building and iterating on feedback loops to learn from user behaviour and continuously improve ranking quality and user satisfaction.
• Cross-functional collaboration - Collaborating with product and engineering teams to productionise search models, define evaluation pipelines, and monitor performance across diverse user segments.
• Expert programming skills - prototyping in Python and SQL with proficiency in core data science frameworks, cloud platforms (AWS and GCP), NLP libraries, LLMs.

Who we’re looking for

• MSc or PhD in Computer Science, Computational Physics, Mathematics, Statistics, or a similar discipline.
• 3+ years of hands on industry experience working in AI search (traditional or NLP)
• Proficiency with a variety of machine learning models (e.g. classification, regression, structured / unstructured data analysis) in a commercial production environment.
• Strong product thinking with a focus on user outcomes, motivated to build fast, relevant, and impactful search experiences.
• Thrive in a fast-paced environment and willing to adapt quickly.
• Confidence in storytelling / influencing with stakeholders to guide the product strategy and roadmap
• Motivation to learn and share knowledge, mentoring others and striving to do things better.

The REA experience

The physical, mental, emotional and financial health of our people is something we’ll never stop caring about. This is a place to learn and grow.

Some of our Perks & Benefits include :

• A hybrid and flexible approach to working
• Flexible leave options including, birthday leave and purchase additional leave
• Flexible parental leave offering for primary and secondary carers
• Our Because We Care program offers employees volunteering leave, community grants, matched payroll giving and our Community Café donates 100% of revenue to charity
• Hackdays so you can bring your big ideas to life

Our commitment to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

We are committed to providing a working environment that embraces and values diversity, equity and inclusion. We believe teams with diverse ideas and experiences are more creative, more effective and fuel disruptive thinking. If you've got the skills, dedication and enthusiasm to learn but don't necessarily meet every single point on the job description, please still get in touch.

Join our Talent Neighbourhood

Keen to be part of REA but didn't find a perfect match with this opportunity? Perhaps the timing isn't right? You should join our Talent Neighbourhood!

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