Senior Data Science Manager

As a Senior Data Science Manager at ZOE, help us turn scientific understanding into actionable algorithms that guide hundreds of thousands of people in changing what they eat. Lead, grow, and coach a high‑performing data function that partners across product, engineering, and science to turn data into insights that drive clear, measurable business impact. Set direction and standards for data‑driven product development roadmaps, science‑led features, and AI product evaluation — balancing hands‑on technical depth with people leadership and delivery excellence.

Team structure

Embedded data scientists within product teams, coaching them and setting technical excellence standards; also lead the Product analytics manager and team, proactively supporting stakeholder management and complex data challenges across the company. Reports to the VP of Engineering and work closely with product, engineering, and science leads on strategy, priorities, and day‑to‑day execution.

The Team

You’ll manage 4–8 Data Scientists (mix of Senior and mid‑level) embedded in stream‑aligned product squads and coordinated through a central Data Science function you lead. You also lead 3‑4 Product analysts through an Analytics Manager.

Your Remit Spans

• Product decision intelligence: Turn data into crisp, actionable insights that guide strategy and day‑to‑day decisions across acquisition, activation, retention, engagement, and health outcomes, including user prediction models that analyse churn and retention; define the right metrics and instrumentation to measure impact.
• Experimentation tooling & validation: Maintain a rigorous culture of A/B testing and statistical experimentation, using causal methods and guardrail rollouts to validate hypotheses and features before scaling.
• Science‑led features: Translate cutting‑edge research into member‑impacting features. Own the algorithmic roadmap and quality for ZOE Scores (versioning, evaluation, and integrity of core scoring algorithms).

This role suits a leader who sees data science as a decision and empowerment lever, pairing strong technical depth with clean, reproducible, deployable outputs.

What You’ll Be Doing

• Blending a hands‑on delivery role with people leadership and stakeholder management, setting the standards for Data Science at ZOE.
• Credible leader of senior data scientists; player‑coach (≈60% leadership/strategy) Technical leadership and hands‑on where it moves the needle (≈40%).

People & Leadership

• Foster a healthy, inclusive, high‑trust culture that blends scientific rigour with product velocity; champion psychological safety and autonomy.
• Provide technical mentorship on statistics, causal inference, and best practices in experimentation; mentor a Senior DS and analytics manager.
• Hire, onboard, and develop a diverse team; run effective 1:1s, goal‑setting, and growth plans.

Technical Excellence

• Champion robust experimentation across cross‑functional product development teams: power analysis, guardrails, segmentation, and trustworthy readouts.
• Set the bar for code craft, reproducibility, and model governance — through architecture reviews, documentation, versioning, and run‑books.
• Predictive Modelling on user behaviour using best practices. e.g., own churn/retention predictive models and member lifecycle propensity models (win‑back, upsell, cross‑sell); partner with Growth/Marketing and Product for interventions.
• Set strategy for evaluation of ML features (e.g., Photo‑logging and successors): offline evaluation suites, human‑in‑the‑loop review, online success metrics, and safety and privacy guardrails.
• Own our data strategy across the data stack, ensuring our insights are built on top of a robust and clean data architecture alongside leadership peers in data engineering and technology.

Product strategy & Stakeholder Alignment

• Communicate progress and insights via concise updates, dashboards, Looms, and exec‑ready briefs.
• Be a key voice in a data‑driven product roadmap: influence priorities with clear success metrics and ruthless trade‑offs.

Our stack

BQ/DBT/SQL, Python/FastAPI, GCP/Vertex AI, Kotlin/Spring AI (team‑dependent). Familiarity with experiment platforms, feature stores/MLFlow, and modern BI/visualisation tools is a plus.

We think you’ll be great if you…

• Have 2+ years leading data scientists and 6+ years in data science/ML, with clear product impact.
• Passionate about coaching and building a team that values autonomy, psychological safety, and growth.
• Bring a track record of data‑driven product decisions and high‑quality experimentation; ship ML/AI features where they move the needle.
• Are fluent in statistics, experiment design, and causal inference; define the right metrics/instrumentation and guide trade‑offs.
• Optimise for reversible decisions, take smart risks, and move quickly with imperfect data (#ActFast).
• Write and review production‑grade Python and SQL; set standards for code quality, reproducibility, and model governance.
• Influence product direction and priorities across embedded squads; communicate complex ideas clearly to varied audiences.
• Use AI tools pragmatically to boost productivity (from IDE assistants to prompt engineering), applying sound evaluation practices to LLM features.
• Communicate crisply—decks, dashboards, Looms, exec‑ready briefs—and influence at the right altitude.

Nice to have

• Ph.D. in Computer Science, ML, or related field, or equivalent experience.
• Experience in health, nutrition, or other regulated domains.
• Familiarity with LLM evaluation, retrieval‑augmented systems, and prompt/agent reliability.
• Experienced in designing and maintaining scalable ML pipelines—from data ingestion to deployment—ensuring reproducibility, model monitoring, and compliance when handling sensitive health data.
• Exposure to feature stores, real‑time inference, and online experimentation at scale.

Ready to thrive? We want to hear from you. The experience, skills, and attributes we’ve outlined are what we believe will help someone truly thrive in this role. However, we understand that talent comes in many forms. If you are genuinely excited about ZOE's mission and this opportunity, please don’t hesitate to apply—even if you don’t meet every single requirement listed. We fundamentally value potential and commitment above all else. We are dedicated to fostering growth and providing opportunities for you to learn and develop alongside us. Referral increases your chances of interviewing at ZOE by 2x.