Data Scientist

The Data Scientist is the first hire on the team whose job is to put machine learning into production, not just into a notebook. You'll build models that power product and other live flows sometimes surfaced to users in real time, not just reported on in a dashboard a week later.

The first flagship project is about personalization across the user journey: a model that decides, per user, what offer to show, wired directly into the product and lifecycle experience rather than sitting in a warehouse table. From there, you'll extend the same muscle: model → API → product surface to other high-leverage moments in the user journey.

You'll work hand-in-hand with Product, Engineering and Lifecycle marketing to ship models as features, not as reports. This is also a foundational role for the team's infrastructure: most of what Data does today is batch (dbt, Lightdash, BigQuery); you'll help establish our first real-time low-latency serving patterns on GCP and work closely with engineering on this.

• Build, validate, and ship ML models (propensity, pricing/discount optimization, personalization, churn/LTV) that go live in the product, not just proof-of-concept notebooks.
• Own the full lifecycle: problem framing, feature engineering, training, evaluation, deployment, monitoring, retraining.
• Write production-grade code (tested, versioned, reviewed) - you'll be shipping alongside Engineering, held to their bar.

2. Personalization across the journey: from paywall to lifecycle

• Design and ship the personalized discounting model: who gets what offer, and why, served at the moment of the paywall decision.
• Partner with product on machine learning experiment design (A/B, holdouts) to prove causal lift of the models, not just correlation.
• Build the measurement framework so pricing/discount decisions are defensible to finance and leadership.
• Stand up our first low-latency model serving pattern on GCP (e.g., Vertex AI endpoints, Cloud Run, or equivalent)
• Define the feature pipeline pattern: what's precomputed in BigQuery/dbt vs. what needs to be fresh/real-time via Pub/Sub or similar.
• Set up model monitoring: drift, staleness, prediction quality so a live model doesn't silently degrade.
• Sit close to Product and Engineering, not just Data this role is measured by what ships to actual users, not just notebooks
• Translate a product problem ("how might we reactive lapsed payers") into a modeling problem, and a model output into an API contract Engineering can build against.
• Document handoffs clearly enough that Engineering can own the serving layer long-term without you as a bottleneck.
• Design uplift/causal models where "who responds to a discount" matters more than "who churns".
• Run and interpret experiments that isolate the model's actual incremental impact on revenue/retention.
• Design the experimentation program for improving data science and machine learning models with the same rigour we use across our already ongoing experimentation programs
• Personalized discounting model live in production, serving real paywall decisions to real users: shipped end-to-end, not a prototype sitting in staging.
• A documented, reusable low-latency serving pattern established on GCP (Vertex AI endpoints or Cloud Run) - the next model doesn't require rebuilding this from scratch.
• Proven incremental lift on a core business metric (paywall conversion, discount margin efficiency, or lapsed-payer reactivation - pick the one you want as the flagship KPI), demonstrated through a controlled experiment, not just before/after comparison.
• Model monitoring in place - drift and staleness alerts mean the team knows within days, not months, if a live model silently degrades.
• A repeatable model-to-production playbook that others in the team can follow

• Genuinely energised by "does this move the metric," not just "is this model accurate."
• Can hold their own in a room with Engineering and with Business: Speaks commercial as well as the language of engineering
• Explains modeling tradeoffs in plain business terms to Product/leadership without dumbing it down or using too much jargon
• Comfortable owning ambiguity - this role is defining the pattern, not following one.

• B2C, subscription, or marketplace experience is a strong plus