Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. People Inc. is a large print and digital publisher serving tens of millions of readers through entertainment brands and digital products. The Director of Data Science will lead customer intelligence and personalization initiatives, applying statistical modeling and machine learning to customer behavior, product analytics, marketing, experimentation, and lifecycle optimization across mobile apps, newsletters, and other touchpoints.
Responsibilities
- Lead and grow a data science team to develop predictive models that estimate customer lifetime value using advanced statistical and machine learning techniques
- Analyze and understand customer interactions across app, web, social media, and email touchpoints to identify and optimize engagement opportunities
- Own product funnel and engagement analysis, including onboarding completion, feature adoption, feature stickiness, and session behavior, as distinct from marketing-funnel metrics such as acquisition and retention
- Leverage data-driven insights to build customer segmentation models, identifying high-value users and informing content and product recommendations
- Partner with Product and Editorial teams to translate user understanding into differentiated experiences across the app, newsletters, and other customer interactions, feeding insights directly into the product development cycle. This includes the sizing of opportunities and assessment of product success
- Design online A/B testing experiments to measure the impact of product changes, personalization, and full-funnel marketing interventions
- Ensure effective collaboration between data science teams and other departments
- Advocate for resources and tools to advance data capabilities
- Align data initiatives with company objectives
Skills
- PhD or advanced degree in Data Science, Economics, Business Analytics, Mathematics, Statistics, or similar quantitative field, or equivalent experience
- 7+ years of experience in data science and machine learning with a strong focus in the area of customer behavior, product analytics, and marketing-focused problems
- 5+ years of experience leading a team of data scientists
- Ability to lead product and funnel analytics on web and mobile platforms with a focus on providing actionable insights, not just data outputs
- Solid foundation in causal inference, survival analysis, and time series analysis, especially as applied to marketing and customer behavior
- Strong proficiency in Python and SQL for data analysis and model development
- Familiarity with Claude Code/Codex and how they can be used reliably (and where they fail) in a data science workflow
- Strong strategic and operational capabilities
- Excellent leadership and communication skills
- Ability to communicate complex analyses clearly to non-technical marketing and business stakeholders
- Drives adoption of new data science methods and technologies to continually expand what the product can do
- Experience with large-scale search and recommendation systems in media, e-commerce, or advertising space
- Experience working with large-scale analytics platforms (e.g., BigQuery)
- Exposure to reinforcement learning or bandit approaches for personalization or offer optimization
- Advanced experimentation techniques, including multivariate testing, factorial designs, and CUPED
- Experience with Bayesian statistical methods for inference and decision-making under uncertainty
- Experience with forecasting models and advanced lifecycle or retention modeling
- Applied NLP experience for content classification, semantic search, or audience understanding
- Track record of leading end-to-end data science projects from problem framing through deployment and impact measurement
- Confidence and pride in representing Data Science as a strategic partner to Marketing and other business teams
- ~5%, ability to travel periodically/quarterly for team meetings/events preferred but flexible based on candidate needs
Benefits
- Annual bonuses
- Short- and long-term incentives
- Medical, dental, vision, and prescription drug coverage
- Unlimited paid time off (PTO)
- Adoption or surrogate assistance
- Donation matching
- Tuition reimbursement
- Basic life insurance
- Basic accidental death & dismemberment insurance
- Supplemental life insurance
- Supplemental accident insurance
- Commuter benefits
- Short-term and long-term disability coverage
- Health savings and flexible spending accounts
- Family care benefits
- A generous 401K savings plan with a company match program
- 10-12 paid holidays annually
- Generous paid parental leave (birthing and non-birthing parents)
- Voluntary pet insurance
- Voluntary accident, critical, and hospital indemnity health insurance coverage
- Voluntary life and disability insurance
- Fully remote with no in-office requirements
Company Overview