Principal Data Scientist

We're a top startup in the emerging GEO/AEO space looking for a data science & AI leader who can both build teams (and as importantly: cultures) and directly build analyses, models, prototypes and AI systems.

We are an early leader in the emerging category of helping businesses understand and optimize their customer journey for the AI era. Our key belief is simple: as consumers have access to ever-more-powerful AI tools, businesses need to make sure they show up well through the lens of their customer's AI, whether that's in ChatGPT, Claude, or future AI apps & agents that haven't been invented yet.

We have an experienced, high-performance founding team that has previously built large B2B SaaS businesses in the marketing and CX space.

In six months, we have built a business that has gone from a handful of early adopters to having over 500 top brands using our platform. We're growing our customer base and revenue significantly every single month and we're shipping product at high velocity.

We have great customers, strong momentum, and plenty of capital. We need to add an exceptional data science leader to our early team to make sure we're creating the right products, team and culture to win long-term. In return, we're offering fair cash compensation, meaningful early-stage equity, and the opportunity to have a significant – and public\! – impact on the company's success.

This category is sometimes called "AI visibility", GEO or AEO, but our ambition goes way past that – to helping businesses connect with their customers in helpful, mutually beneficial ways at every step of their (or their AI's\!) journey.

A major part of our value prop is to help customers manage the chaos of the AI landscape by giving them accurate, timely, and powerful analyses of where they have meaningful risks and opportunities to improve and suggesting specific actions they can take to do so. To do that, we need to not only build analyses and recommendation systems but also create a culture and technical environment where we can continuously experiment with data & AI-powered capabilities.

• Experiencing building meaningful ML/AI-powered systems, like recommenders, classifiers, sophisticated information retrieval or ranking systems, etc. from zero to one (at a startup or inside an existing enterprise.)

• Experience leading teams — whether large or small – of researchers, data scientists, or AI/ML engineers – in a fast-paced environment. (This will initially be an IC role, but we are growing quickly.)

• Excellent analytical skills and familiarity with modern analysis tools, using SQL on CDWs (e.g. BigQuery, Snowflake, Clickhouse), cloud-based notebook computing, pandas or polars, and more.

• Experience building AI systems using LLMs, VLMs, or smaller transformer-based models – in a rigorous way, starting with looking at the data\! But ideally moving on to building eval suites and setting up ongoing performance monitoring.

• A scientific, but pragmatic approach to experimentation and analysis – we care deeply about delivering value to our customers; sometimes that means shipping a V1 that isn't perfect so we can get the data to ship a V2 that nails it.

• Experience with, and a nuanced appreciation for the strengths and weaknesses of, modern consumer/prosumer AI chatbots, search tools and agents a plus

• Collaborate with engineers, PMs, and with cross-functional teams and even customers to understand where adding intelligence to the product can help them – and where current AI / ML-based systems might not be

• Run analyses and experiments to inform your own work and the work of the entire company

• Be hands on writing code – in notebooks or even in production – to test new models, prompts, and systems

• Mentor AI & data engineers to be more effective at working with AI/ML systems – better analysts, more rigorous experimenters, and with more tools in their toolbelt.

• Collaborate with our CTO, CEO, and marketing teams to create analyses, reports, posts & videos that help advance the ecosystem's understanding of AI and how to evolve to meet the rapidly changing business environment AI is driving – for technical practitioners, marketers and customer experience professionals, and high-level executives.

• Look at a lot of data 🙂

Scrunch AI is an equal opportunity employer. We welcome people of all backgrounds, experiences, perspectives, and identities. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.