Senior Data Scientist – Data & Personalization Platform

Role Overview

• We're looking for a Senior Data Scientist to help lead the technical evolution of a large-scale personalization and assignment platform.
• You'll design and own the data systems that match members to offers — from batch pipelines processing hundreds of millions to billions of records to the scoring frameworks that decide what each member sees.
• This is a senior individual contributor role with technical leadership scope.
• You won't have direct reports, but you'll help set technical direction, guide junior data scientists and engineers, and own workstreams end-to-end.
• The platform is actively evolving toward ML-driven personalization and generative AI, and we're looking for someone who wants to help shape that direction.

Requirements

• Master’s degree in data science or related field
• 5+ years of experience in a data science role
• Strong technical foundation across both data science and data engineering — this role owns and directs production pipelines, not just analysis.
• Proven experience designing and leading large-scale data processing systems (hundreds of millions to billions of records), including batch architecture, partitioning, staging, and performance optimization.
• Track record designing activity-based segmentation and tiering frameworks (e.g., RFM-style models, engagement tiers, merchant activity classifications) — from threshold definition through refresh cadence and validation against business outcomes.
• Hands-on background building scoring, ranking, or recommendation frameworks, with feature selection, weighting strategies (rule-based, heuristic, or ML-driven), and evaluation against business objectives; experience evolving such systems from deterministic scoring toward ML-based personalization.
• Experience designing and managing customer segmentation pipelines and feature generation at scale, including the lifecycle management of member groups, derived attributes, and reusable feature sets.
• Experience with workflow orchestration (Airflow/MWAA or equivalent) and AWS data services (S3, Glue, Aurora/PostgreSQL).
• Strong SQL and Python skills — able to review, guide, and produce production-quality data pipeline code.
• Understanding of event-driven architectures and Kafka-based data replication patterns.
• Experience with or strong understanding of real-time or near-real-time data systems, and the ability to provide architectural guidance even when not the primary builder.
• Ability to define pipeline SLAs and data freshness guarantees, including monitoring, alerting, and incident response for batch and near-real-time workflows.
• Experience working with large-scale member or customer data in a personalization, targeting, loyalty, or recommendation context.
• Demonstrated ability to work cross-functionally and influence without authority; self-directed and able to own a workstream end-to-end with minimal oversight.
• Strong written and verbal communication; able to produce clear documentation and present findings to non-technical audiences.

Tech Stack

• Airflow
• AWS
• Kafka
• Postgres
• Python
• SQL

Benefits

• Comprehensive benefits package, which includes:
• Competitive Time Off Benefits: including flexible PTO, 11 company holidays, and parental leave.
• Generous dining reimbursement when you dine with our restaurant clients
• 401(k) plan with a company match
• Two medical plan options
• Standard PPO or High Deductible Health Plan (HSA with company match for HDHP participants)
• Partnership with Rx n Go, offering certain prescriptions for free
• Two dental plan options and a vision plan
• Flexible Spending Accounts and a pre-tax commuter benefit program
• Accident, Critical Illness, and Hospital Indemnity Insurance Plans
• Short Term and Long Term disability
• Company-paid life insurance and AD&D insurance, supplemental employee, spouse, and child life insurance
• Employee Life Assistance Program
• Hybrid working environment in a new office space downtown near the Metra Train stations and catered lunches on Tuesdays.