Data Scientist

⌘Role Overview

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.

⌘Key Responsibilities

1. Production ML Development

• 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.

3. ML Infrastructure & MLOps (GCP)

• 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.

4. Product & Engineering Partnership

• 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.

5. Experimentation & Causal Inference

• 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

⌘Expected Outcomes

• 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

⌘Skills & Competencies

Must have (hard skills)

• Strong Python for data science and ML (scikit-learn, XGBoost/LightGBM; PyTorch or TensorFlow a plus if deep learning is relevant to future use cases).
• Proven track record shipping models to production, not just modeling in a notebook. Can talk through at least one model that served live traffic.
• Hands-on experience with a cloud ML platform, ideally GCP (Vertex AI, BigQuery ML, Cloud Run/Functions) or fast ability to translate equivalent AWS/Azure experience.
• Solid SQL; comfortable working against a dbt/BigQuery warehouse.
• Software engineering fundamentals: git, code review, testing, CI/CD: You'll be shipping code Engineering has to trust.
• Causal inference / uplift modelling or applied experimentation experience: pricing and discounting need "what if we hadn't," not just "who churns."

Nice to have

• Experience with streaming/event pipelines (Pub/Sub, Dataflow, Kafka): useful as we move off pure batch.
• Experience with pricing, discounting, personalization specifically.
• Familiarity with feature stores or the DIY equivalent (versioned feature pipelines).
• Multi-armed bandits or reinforcement learning for pricing/personalization.
• Startup experience: comfortable being the first person to build something rather than joining an existing ML platform team.

Soft skills

• 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.

⌘Required experience

• 4–7 years in a data scientist / ML engineer role, with at least one model you personally took from prototype to live production serving real users or real traffic.
• Quantitative background (CS, stats, engineering or equivalent hands-on experience).
• B2C, subscription, or marketplace experience is a strong plus
• Fluent English.

⌘Recruitment process

Introduction Call - 30min with Talent Acquisition Manager

Business Interview - 30min with VP Data

Case Study - Async assessment

Panel Interview - Case study Q&A

Final interview - Interview with Product Manager

Originally posted on Himalayas