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Lead Data Scientist / Applied Statistician

Hybrid - San Francisco Bay Area

About the Job:

We are currently looking for a Lead Data Scientist to join our Decision Science Products team. As a lead data scientist you will help us choose and develop the best statistical methods for various data and decision science products. The decision science products teams currently own experimentation, LaunchDarkly’s second largest product, and are developing additional products that rely heavily on statistics, especially sequential testing, Bayesian optimization, and various machine learning methods. We're looking for someone who can work efficiently as a lead data scientist on the decision science team getting solutions from concept to production.

Our data platform processes events from over twenty billion feature flag evaluations, and billions of experimentation metrics events daily. The core technologies we use daily include Golang, Scala, Kinesis, and Flink. As a lead data scientist you will oversee finding the appropriate statistical methods for various problems in our product space, and working with data engineers to implement those solutions at scale. You will also mentor other data scientists and work with them to deliver sound, performant statistical methods.

Your work will be used by companies from small to large, across multiple industries, allowing them to make the best business decisions possible.

Responsibilities: 

  • Build and expand our data and decision science products
  • Design statistical solutions for new products and evolving customer needs
  • Collaborate with product team to influence and deliver user-facing features
  • Partner with customers to solve diverse data challenges using our products
  • Promote  statistics standards, tooling, and processes
  • Opportunity to work on industry or academic papers for new methodologies
  • Opportunity to build out a team of data scientists
  • Opportunity to help educate customers via blog posts, office hours, etc.

Qualifications:

  • Advanced degree in Statistics, Mathematics, Physics, Economics or related quantitative field
  • Proven experience and fluency in probability and statistics
  • Experience building experimentation tools
  • Appreciation for both frequentist and Bayesian statistics
  • Strong communication skills, a positive attitude, and empathy
  • You hold yourself and others to a high bar when working with statistics
  • You value high code quality, reproducibility, and other data engineering best practices

Bonus Points:

  • Experience with sequential testing

 

As a Senior Product Manager for our Feature Management team, you will own business outcomes and feature delivery for a large portion of our core product area. Your responsibilities will encompass strategic product planning, market insights, and customer research. You will also partner with engineering and design to own new feature development, and partner with revenue and marketing teams on go-to-market functions for new products. In addition to owning certain core feature areas, you will also lead a new initiative to build a Forward Deployed engineering team. This new team will have a portfolio that includes paid engineering projects that directly generate revenue and other targeted efforts that directly unlock revenue opportunities with our enterprise customers.

Responsibilities:

  • Customer discovery: Engage deeply with customers to identify opportunities and needs. Translate these insights into actionable feature projects and long term strategy.
  • Product strategy: Own market research, strategy, and product roadmap for your feature management ownership areas. Build opinions on how to win both now and in the future.
  • Solution design: Collaborate with engineering and design to deliver amazing customer experiences that deliver business value.
  • Project leadership: Oversee the end-to-end lifecycle of product builds, including writing PRDs, scoping, pricing, planning, and ensuring timely, high-quality delivery.
  • Customer relationships: Act as the primary point of contact, maintaining strong relationships and providing ongoing support and strategic guidance throughout the project lifecycle.
  • End-to-end ownership: In partnership with revenue and marketing teams, take full responsibility for ensuring a successful delivery to market for new features, defining success metrics, and leading the team to achieve milestones and deliver exceptional outcomes.
  • Forward deployed team: Own project delivery for unique enterprise customer feature needs as product owner for the Forward Deployed engineering team.

About you:

  • Customer-centric: You are driven to understand customer challenges and needs, crafting solutions that achieve business goals and provide real value.
  • Product sense: You love great software and can’t stand bad software. You have a strong focus on craft, quality, and the ability to deeply empathize with the end user to deliver delightful experiences.
  • Collaborative: You excel at working with diverse teams, seamlessly bridging customer stakeholders, revenue partners, and product development teams
  • Effective communicator: You build strong relationships and communicate with clarity and precision. You’re an incredible writer who can concisely explain complex ideas in simple ways to a wide variety of audiences.
  • Adaptable: You thrive in fast-paced environments and can effectively prioritize in order to manage multiple projects at once.
  • High agency: You are motivated to achieve success and have a strong sense of ownership to deliver great outcomes across a broad range of responsibilities. Even if it’s not your responsibility, If you see something that needs to be done, you make sure it happens.
  • Business acumen: You understand how technical solutions tie to business objectives and can align projects to meet customer and company goals.

Qualifications:

  • Autonomy and growth mindset: Ability to independently learn new product areas quickly and become an adaptable expert for unique customer scenarios.
  • Critical thinking: Capability to analyze situations and form well-reasoned opinions on the best course of action, making important decisions swiftly and effectively.
  • Customer-centric: Experience in diving deep into customer needs and translating these insights into real, creative solutions.
  • Technical fluency: Ability to engage in technical discussions with engineers and bridge technical teams with business goals.
  • Project leadership: Known for getting things done and being unrelentingly reliable. Proven track record of driving cross-functional and complex projects to excellent outcomes.
  • B2B SaaS expertise: Prior experience building B2B SaaS products and features, ideally in the developer tools space or similar.
  • Revenue and metrics focus: Proven track record of generating revenue and business impact through innovative product solutions and customer engagement.

Pay:

Target pay range for a Level P6 based in the San Francisco Bay Area:

  • $230,000 - $270,000**

LaunchDarkly operates from a place of high trust and transparency; we are happy to state the pay range for our open roles to best align with your needs. Exact compensation may vary based on skills, experience, and location.

**Restricted Stock Units (RSUs), health, vision, and dental insurance, and mental health benefits in addition to salary.

About LaunchDarkly:

Modern software delivery was supposed to be the foundation for a thriving digital business but reality has proven otherwise. Slow, inefficient development cycles, costly outages, and fragmented customer experiences are preventing developers from building their best software. The LaunchDarkly platform helps developers innovate on new features faster while protecting them with a safety valve to instantly rewind when things go wrong. Developers can target product experiences to any customer segment and maximize the business impact of every feature. And by gradually rolling out new application components, they escape nightmare "big-bang" technology migrations. 

The LaunchDarkly platform was built to guide engineers to the next frontier of DevOps by:

  • Improving the velocity and stability of software releases, without the fear of end customer outages
  • Delivering targeted experiences by easily personalizing features to customer cohorts
  • Maximizing the business impact of every feature through the ability to experiment and optimize
  • Coordinating the release and optimization of software to provide consistent experiences across mobile platforms and device types
  • Improving the effectiveness and productivity of engineering teams, by providing insights into engineering cadence and stability

At LaunchDarkly, we believe in the power of teams. We're building a team that is humble, open, collaborative, respectful and kind. We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity at our company. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status. LD invites any applicant to review our written Affirmative Action Plan. To do so, contact People Ops at hr@launchdarkly.com. 

One of our company values is 'Widen the Circle'. Which means we seek out diversity of perspectives to get better results. We understand everyone has their own unique talents and experiences. We encourage you to apply to this role even if you don’t think you meet 100% of the qualifications outlined above. We can find out together if it's the right match for your skillset.

Do you need a disability accommodation?

Fill out this accommodations request form and someone from our People Operations team will contact you for assistance. 

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