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Lead Data Scientist

San Francisco, CA, Brooklyn, NY, Cambridge, MA, or remote

Philo: a streaming service for TV and movie lovers

At Philo, we’re a group of technology and product people who set out to build the future of television, marrying the best in modern technology with the most compelling medium ever invented — in short, we’re building the TV experience that we’ve always wanted for ourselves. In practice this means leveraging cloud delivery, modern tech stacks, machine learning, and hand-crafted native app experiences on all of our platforms. We aim to deliver a rock solid experience on the streaming basics, while cooking up next generation multi-screen and multi-user playback experiences.

Data Science at Philo

Data underpins everything we do at Philo: making informed business decisions; analyzing and improving the quality of our streaming experience; running product experiments to optimize our signup flows and improve user journeys; and making it effortless for our users to find the perfect thing to watch. Philo serves over a billion streams to its users every year, generating a wealth of data that we leverage at all levels of the organization. Philo’s data pipeline processes nearly 8 trillion events per year into our petabyte scale data lake, where we run over 30k ETL and BI queries every day to bring data-driven insights to our team.

On the Data Science team, we’re looking for people who excel at deep statistical and data modeling, experimentation, and identifying actionable insights on a variety of interesting engagement, content discoverability, acquisition, and retention-related problems across our streaming service. You’ll be working closely with other data scientists, analysts, and engineers to build and deploy solutions directly for our service. In addition, you’ll work with stakeholders in other departments to understand our business needs and deliver business-focused data insights to help the entire team thrive.

We are passionate about problem-solving and providing data-informed insights through rigorous statistical methods, using both cutting-edge techniques and proven practices in close collaboration with every department. To complete our work we build on modern open-source tools including dbt, Cursor, GrowthBook, Robyn, Superset, and PyTorch, as well as SaaS tools such as Segment, Redshift, SageMaker, AWS Glue, Mode, Avo, and BigEye.

Some of the recent projects our Data Science team members have worked on include:

  • Building multi-touch attribution models to optimize customer lifetime value and calculate RoAS (Return on Ad Spend)
  • Modeling to determine which early product behaviors predict conversion and retention
  • Running experiments to evaluate and improve our ML-based content recommendation/personalization system
  • Building data models for analysis of lifecycle marketing communications impact
  • Modeling to analyze the impact of Quality of Experience events (e.g. rebuffering) on customer engagement and other business metrics.
  • Price sensitivity research and competitive market analyses.

The Role

Philo is looking for a Lead Data Scientist to join our team and help elevate our data science practice. This role will provide senior leadership, establish methodological rigor, and coach our data science team to deliver high-impact analytical solutions. You have strong opinions about what high-quality Data Science work looks like and are impact oriented. You can work across multiple business units and have a keen sense of how to connect Data Science outputs to organizational KPIs.

Responsibilities:

  • Set the roadmap and model best practices for data science work at Philo
  • Lead complex analytical projects that drive significant business value collaborating with stakeholders in the C-Suite 
  • Establish and evangelize methodological standards for data science work
  • Coach and mentor data scientists to elevate the team’s technical capabilities
  • Collaborate with product, engineering, and business teams to identify new opportunities
  • Develop frameworks for measuring impact of data science initiatives
  • Build a culture of experimentation and continuous improvement
  • Represent the data science team in cross-functional leadership discussions

Key Qualifications:

  • 10+ years of professional experience in data science/analytics with demonstrated proficiency in Python, SQL, or R and statistical modeling
  • 3+ years of experience leading data science teams and managing complex statistical projects
  • Deep expertise in statistical methods and causal inference
  • Strong experience in experimental design and A/B testing
  • Deep experience in building a robust and scalable data model as the foundation for both analysis and advanced modeling
  • Proven track record of delivering high-impact data science projects that scale
  • Experience mentoring junior data scientists and raising team capabilities
  • Excellent communication skills with ability to translate complex findings into business insights through effective data visualization and dashboards
  • Strong business acumen and ability to connect analytics to business outcomes
  • Experience with modern data science tools and technologies, including Python, Cursor, dbt, GrowthBook, and BI dashboarding tools

Ideal Qualifications:

  • Experience in media/streaming industry with understanding of viewer engagement metrics and content performance analysis
  • Knowledge of recommendation systems and personalization algorithms using PyTorch or similar frameworks
  • Experience with productionizing machine learning models in cloud environments like AWS SageMaker
  • Familiarity with data visualization best practices and experience creating executive-level dashboards
  • Experience with marketing mix modeling, multi-touch attribution, and customer lifetime value optimization

More about Philo

At Philo, we’re a company that puts people first—both our subscribers and our team. Our philosophy is to empower our colleagues to do their best work while supporting each other in pursuing shared goals. We value pragmatism, pride in our work, and passion. Transparency and openness are fundamental to our company culture. We are committed to diversity and inclusion as we grow the Philo team and shape the future of TV. We believe that a diverse set of voices and perspectives on our team enables us to innovate faster and create the best experience for our subscribers.

Philo offers access to top-rated networks, including AMC, BET, CMT, Comedy Central, Discovery, Food Network, Hallmark, HGTV, History, Investigation Discovery, Lifetime, MTV, Nickelodeon, OWN, VH1, WE tv, and more, along with groundbreaking originals and blockbuster movies included with AMC+. Our service also includes 80+ free channels and premium add-ons like STARZ and MGM+.

Our extensive library boasts over 75,000 titles, and our unlimited DVR allows users to save their favorite shows and movies for up to a year, skipping ads for a seamless viewing experience. Stream on up to three devices simultaneously, whether on your phone, tablet, laptop, or TV using Roku, Apple TV, Fire TV, Samsung TV, Android TV, Vizio TV, or Chromecast.

Philo is headquartered in San Francisco, with offices in New York and Cambridge, MA. Our leadership team includes a co-founder of Facebook and alums from Meraki and HBO, backed by NEA and industry partners like Discovery, Viacom, AMC, and A&E.

Join us at Philo and be part of a team that's shaping the future of TV!

Status: Full-time
Location: San Francisco, CA, Brooklyn, NY, Cambridge, MA, or remote
Compensation: Includes annual salary between $172K-$237K depending on experience and location, company stock options, and health benefits

We value a diverse and inclusive workplace and we welcome people of different backgrounds, experiences, skills, and perspectives. Philo is an equal opportunity employer. We believe that everyone does their best work when they are supported by each other and the company, and we offer a generous set of benefits to make sure the Philo team is happy and healthy. Here is a sampling of the benefits we offer our team:

  • Full health, dental and vision coverage for you and your family
  • 401(k) plan with employer contributions (we match 100% of deferrals up to 3% of pay and 50% of the next 2% of pay)
  • Flexible working hours
  • Up to 20 weeks of fully paid parental leave
  • Unlimited paid time off for vacation and sick leave
  • $2,000 annual vacation bonus (we pay you to take a two week vacation)
  • $5,250 annually for professional development and educational assistance
  • $1,250 annual home office + TV stipend during first year of employment ($250 annually thereafter)
  • $500/month ($6,000/year) bonus for employees who commit to working at least 3 days per week in our offices, plus generous commuter benefits ($315/month towards transit, rideshare, bike rental, or parking at our HQ office in San Francisco)
  • Free Gympass subscription — an all-in-one corporate benefit that gives employees the largest selection of gyms, studios, classes, training and wellness apps
  • Dog-friendly office
  • And much more!

For California Residents: Philo’s CCPA Notice at Collection – Employees, Applicants, Owners, Directors, Officers and Contractors

Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

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