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CookUnity

Senior Data Scientist, Growth & Retention

Department
Engineering
Job Type / Location
New York
Experience Required
5+ years
Posted On

About the Role

We’re hiring for an experienced ML-focused Data Scientist to own growth-oriented modeling across the customer lifecycle - acquisition, activation, retention, resurrection and monetization. You’ll work alongside other data scientist to design, validate, and productionize statistical and ML systems (pLTV, churn/survival, uplift/incrementality, lookalikes, clustering/embeddings, NBA/ranking) that directly drive growth. This is a hands-on role for someone with strong mathematical/statistical foundations, broad modeling experience, and pragmatic MLOps chops who can lead experiments and partner closely with Marketing, Engineering, CRM, and Product.

What you’ll do…

  • Lifecycle modeling: Build and maintain predictive LTV, churn (including survival/time-to-event), order-rate, and resurrection models that feed acquisition, CRM, and retention strategies.
  • Acquisition & lookalikes: Create lookalike / propensity models for paid channels and audience construction; optimize CAC vs LTV tradeoffs.
  • Next-Best-Action & personalization: Develop NBA/ranking models, small-scale recommenders and embedding-based similarity systems to increase activation and orders.
  • Unsupervised & representation learning: Lead segmentation, clustering, embeddings and representation work that create actionable cohorts and features.
  • Production & MLOps: Own the full model lifecycle - training pipelines, CI/CD, model registries, containerized deployment, monitoring, retraining and drift detection; partner with engineers to operationalize models into CRM, marketplace and paid channels.
  • Model governance & reproducibility: Ensure models are well-tested, explainable, calibrated, and auditable; document assumptions, limitations and business mappings.
  • Cross-functional influence: Translate technical work into product recommendations, dashboards and clear narratives for Growth, Marketing and Engineering. Mentor peers and raise modeling and MLOps standards.

Required qualifications

  • 5-8+ years in data science, applied ML or statistics, with a track record of shipping production models.
  • Strong math & statistics: probability, inference, regression, survival analysis/time-to-event, causal reasoning, and familiarity with statistical modeling tradeoffs.
  • End-to-end ML experience: experience building, validating and deploying classification/regression/ensemble/deep models; comfort with embeddings and representation learning.
  • MLOps & production skills: pragmatic experience with model CI/CD, model registries (MLFlow or similar), containerization (Docker), orchestration (Airflow), and runtime infra (K8s / ECS).
  • Software engineering & tooling: Python (pandas, scikit-learn, XGBoost/LightGBM, PyTorch/TensorFlow optional), strong code hygiene, testing and reproducibility.
  • Product & stakeholder collaboration: excellent communication, ability to embed with Growth/CRM/Marketing and translate models into product decisions.
  • Education: BS in a quantitative field required; MS/PhD in statistics, math, CS, economics or similar preferred.

Nice-to-haves

  • Experience in subscription marketplaces, food-tech, or consumer marketplaces.
  • Familiarity with feature stores, Snowflake/BigQuery, and production monitoring tools.
  • Experience with causal libraries (EconML), uplift frameworks, or survival modeling packages.
  • Prior work on small-scale recommender systems, embeddings, or NLP personalization.

View Assessment Process

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