Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Destination Pet is launching a new, PE-backed business unit focused on building a differentiated data platform for the pet health and pet services ecosystem. They are seeking a Director of Data Science to help build the analytical foundation of this business from the ground up, working with complex data to create commercially valuable insights.
Responsibilities
- Help define and build the data science strategy for a newly formed pet health data business unit
- Analyze large, complex, and multi-source datasets related to pet health, veterinary care, pet services, customer behavior, and service utilization
- Build predictive models, segmentation models, forecasting tools, and other analytical solutions to identify trends, patterns, and commercial opportunities
- Partner with product, technology, commercial, operations, and executive stakeholders to identify data products and insights that can be monetized
- Support the development of data products that may be sold to external customers, partners, or industry stakeholders
- Work with internal and external data sources, including veterinary partners, pet care centers, customer systems, and third-party datasets
- Lead cross-functional efforts in data cleaning, normalization, deduplication, taxonomy creation, and quality control to ensure data integrity and support ongoing monitoring
- Translate complex analytical findings into clear, actionable insights for non-technical audiences
- Help establish best practices for responsible data use, privacy, governance, de-identification, and data quality
- Operate comfortably in an entrepreneurial environment where business models are still being developed
- Drive the creation of novel, statistically differentiated predictive models, supported by a strong track record in research and data science
- Help shape the future structure, tools, and capabilities of the data science function as the business scales
Skills
- Bachelor's degree in Data Science, Statistics, Computer Science, Mathematics, Engineering, Economics, Bioinformatics, or a related quantitative field
- 6-10+ years of experience in data science, advanced analytics, machine learning, statistical modeling, or a related quantitative role
- Strong proficiency in Python and/or R
- Strong SQL skills and experience working with relational databases and large datasets
- Experience working with messy, fragmented, or multi-source data and turning it into usable analytical assets
- Demonstrated experience building predictive models, segmentation frameworks, forecasting models, machine learning models, or other advanced analytical solutions
- Strong understanding of data quality, feature engineering, statistical inference, experimentation, model validation, and analytical best practices
- Ability to communicate complex analysis clearly to executive, commercial, product, and non-technical stakeholders
- Comfort working in a newly formed business, startup-like environment, or high-growth setting with ambiguity and evolving priorities
- Master's degree or PhD in a quantitative discipline
- Experience in a newly formed company, startup, venture-backed company, PE-backed company, or corporate incubation environment
- Experience building data products, commercial analytics products, data platforms, data marketplaces, or monetizable insight products
- Experience in healthcare, veterinary medicine, pet care, life sciences, insurance, consumer health, retail, marketplace businesses, or multi-site services
- Experience working with regulated, sensitive, privacy-conscious, or consumer data environments
- Familiarity with privacy-preserving analytics, de-identification, aggregation, consent frameworks, and responsible data-use practices
- Experience with cloud data platforms such as Snowflake, Databricks, AWS, GCP, Azure, or similar
- Experience with BI and visualization tools such as Tableau, Power BI, Looker, Sigma, or similar
- Experience partnering with product, engineering, commercial, legal, operations, and executive teams
Benefits
- Health, vision, dental, long & short-term disability, and life insurance
- 401K match
- Pet care discounts
- Flexible Time Off
- Parental Leave
Company Overview