Senior Data Scientist

USA TODAY Co. is seeking a Senior Data Scientist to join its product organization in a remote role. You will help steer product strategy using rigorous reporting, deep-dive analysis, and predictive or prescriptive modeling, with a focused emphasis on metrics and AI data initiatives.

In this position, you will collaborate closely with Product, Engineering, Analytics, and business stakeholders to define success measures, evaluate product and feature changes, and translate complex results into clear recommendations that support roadmap and investment decisions.

What you’ll do

• Partner with Product Managers, Engineers, and cross-functional stakeholders to answer strategic product questions using reporting, analysis, deep dives, and predictive or prescriptive modeling.
• Forecast business outcomes and identify opportunities to improve product performance.
• Define, maintain, and improve key product metrics, dashboards, and monitoring frameworks used to assess product performance and business impact.
• Apply machine learning to customer behavior and engagement, including retention, churn, propensity scoring, segmentation, recommendation systems, and personalization initiatives.
• Evaluate product launches, feature changes, and AI-enabled initiatives by measuring outcomes against success metrics and communicating recommendations.
• Support experimentation and measurement design, including hypothesis development, test readouts, and post-launch evaluations where applicable.
• Build scalable modeling, reporting, and self-service analytics assets to improve decision-making speed and consistency across the product organization.
• Work with data engineering and platform teams to improve data quality, instrumentation, metric definitions, and the reliability of reporting pipelines.
• Translate complex findings into concise narratives, presentations, and recommendations for both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Support AI data initiatives by helping build and evaluate models, measure features, and create analytics frameworks that assess customer and business impact.

What you bring

• Bachelor’s degree in a quantitative field such as Statistics, Economics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Engineering, or a related discipline (advanced degree preferred).
• 5+ years of experience in data science, product analytics, decision science, or a closely related analytics role supporting product teams.
• Strong SQL skills and proficiency in Python for data analysis, statistical modeling, predictive modeling, and data exploration.
• Experience with PyTorch, scikit-learn, and other machine learning frameworks to build, evaluate, and deploy models.
• Knowledge of feature engineering, model selection, cross-validation, hyperparameter tuning, and performance evaluation.
• Experience developing dashboards and visualizations for executive reporting and day-to-day product decisions.
• Strong understanding of product metrics, experimentation, hypothesis testing, and statistical analysis.
• Experience working with large, messy, multi-source datasets to produce actionable recommendations.
• Excellent communication skills, including the ability to explain technical findings in plain language and influence stakeholders using data.
• Experience supporting AI or ML-related product initiatives, model evaluations, or measurement frameworks is preferred.

Technologies

• SQL
• Python
• PyTorch
• scikit-learn

Additional preferred experience

• Experience in media, ad tech, mar tech, digital subscriptions, marketplaces, or other product-led businesses.
• Experience in cloud data environments and product instrumentation best practices.
• Experience working in highly cross-functional environments where priorities shift quickly and decision support is critical.

Compensation and logistics

• Job family: Enterprise Data Management
• Job function: Data Science
• Pay type: Salary
• Annual base salary range: USD 115,000 - 120,000
• Location: Remote ( #LI-REMOTE, #LI-NR2 )
• Applicants must be authorized to work in the applicable location.