Data Senior Scientist

We're seeking a Senior Data Scientist to lead high-impact initiatives that advance our data strategy and enhance how millions of people experience our content. In this hands-on role, you'll design and deploy scalable, data-driven products-from advanced machine learning models to personalized recommendation systems-while guiding best practices across the data organization.

You'll collaborate with a diverse team of data engineers, analysts, and researchers to deliver end-to-end solutions, from exploratory analysis through deployment and monitoring. This role combines technical expertise, strategic thinking, and mentorship to strengthen our data-first culture and drive meaningful business outcomes.

Responsibilities

• Lead and deliver complex data science initiatives from concept to implementation, designing and deploying models, systems, and other scalable data-driven solutions that drive business impact.
• Leverage advanced statistical and machine learning techniques across a range of goals, such as:
  • Drive user engagement and subscription growth
  • Improve content recommendation systems for user facing and internal platforms
  • Evaluate the effectiveness of product changes by leveraging offline analyses and A/B test results
• Drive the growth of LLM capabilities across the organization by building innovative applications and strengthening evaluation methodologies for LLM-based solutions
• Propose and evaluate impactful project directions and methodologies, working closely with your supervisor to drive effective execution.
• Mentor, and support junior data scientists to accelerate their development and drive overall team growth.
• Translate the results of implemented solutions into compelling presentations and dashboards that inform stakeholders, demonstrate impact, and track ongoing progress.
• Develop, validate, deploy, and maintain projects following industry best practices for collaboration, documentation, reproducibility, and scalability.
• Stay current with industry trends, tools, and emerging techniques in relevant areas of data science.
• Other duties as assigned.

Job Requirements

• Bachelor's degree or higher in Data Science, Statistics, Computer Science, or a related STEM field. With a bachelor's degree 5+ years of relevant industry experience in data science roles, OR 3+ with a master's degree, OR 1+ with a PhD.
• Advanced statistical, machine learning, and predictive modeling experience.
• Strong knowledge of Python and SQL.
• Experience integrating cloud-based storage and compute services into end-to-end ML pipelines (e.g., AWS, GCP, or Azure).
• Hands-on experience with best practices for model development and deployment such as unit testing, CI/CD, Docker, experiment tracking, model registries, and model monitoring.
• Proven ability to complete end-to-end data science projects, from exploratory analysis to model deployment and monitoring.
• Strong data visualization skills for delivering insights.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills for reporting, documentation, and stakeholder presentations. Ability to communicate results clearly to non-technical audiences.
  
  

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with media and/or subscription-based products
• Background in recommendation systems or personalization within a highly dynamic setting.
• Hands-on experience applying large language models (LLMs) in an industry setting. Familiarity with AWS Bedrock, Hugging Face, or similar services and platforms.
• Experience with A/B testing, and understanding of core concepts like statistical significance and power.
• Exposure to dbt and analytics engineering best practices.

The L.A. Times is an equal opportunity employer and welcomes all qualified applicants regardless of race, ethnicity, religion, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, disability status, protected veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law. We actively work to create an inclusive environment where all of our employees can thrive. This Privacy Notice for Los Angeles Times sets forth how we will use the information we obtain when you apply for a position with us. Explore our company history, achievement, values, mission and more on our career site.

The pay scale the Company reasonably expects to pay for this position at the time of the posting is $145,000 to $170,000 and takes into account a wide range of factors including but not limited to skill set, experience, training, licenses, certifications, and other business or organizational needs. Compensation will be determined based on the above factors along with the requirements of the position. At the L.A. Times, it is not typical for an individual to be hired at or near the top of the range for the role. Please visit our career site to view the benefits available to our employees. We recommend adding our applicant tracking system domain (@dayforce.com) as a safe sender or contact, sometimes these emails get filtered to candidates' spam folders.