The Senior Data Scientist will optimize the Places app's recommendations using data analysis, A/B testing, and collaboration with cross-functional teams.
In a world where many social apps measure their success by time spent online, Raya is a technology company focused on providing utility. Our apps, Raya and Places, are tools for discovery of and access to exciting people and places globally. We believe that by marrying great software with a membership-based community built around core values of trust, curation, and authenticity, we can provide solutions that have heretofore been impossible.
Raya’s team is composed of talented, compassionate individuals from all over the globe with diverse backgrounds and professional experiences including folks from Apple, Google, Amazon, Meta, Snap, Twitter, Instacart, Paypal and more. We prioritize learning and teamwork and love giving people the opportunity to champion big challenges and grow into better versions of themselves. A great candidate is excited to support the product team's initiatives, are diligent self-starters and excellent executors.
In this role you will be the primary data scientist on our Places app, with full ownership over how data is used to build and optimize a recommendations-first experience. This is a rare chance to shape our data strategy from the ground up and have a direct, visible impact across the entire product. You’ll work closely with product, engineering, and design to explore user behavior, run experiments, and make our product more personalized and impactful.
This role is a great fit for someone who loves figuring things out from scratch: from diving into ambiguous questions and building dashboards, to collaborating with ML and infra teams on lightweight model improvements.
We offer comprehensive medical and dental coverage, $50 a day meal budget, equity-based employment, a great culture, learning opportunities, unlimited vacation, 12 weeks paid parental leave, and we pay all employees $1,000 a year to go somewhere in the world that they’ve never been because of our values of human connection, empathy, and curiosity. You can see more at the bottom of our careers page: https://careers.rayatheapp.com/
In this role, you will:
- Build and maintain dashboards and metrics, helping the team self-serve and monitor key performance indicators
- Dig into user behavior, search logs, and engagement data to uncover patterns and generate new hypotheses
- Help improve data organization and infrastructure, reducing ad hoc work and improving scalability
- Design and analyze A/B tests and other experiments to guide product decisions and measure impact
- Leverage off-the-shelf models and experimentation frameworks to optimize relevance and personalization features
- Apply and evaluate large language models (LLMs) for tasks such as semantic search, personalization, and user understanding, while developing expertise in LLM evaluation methodologies and best practices
- Collaborate with ML engineers and backend/infra teams to make incremental improvements to existing recommendations systems and embedding pipelines
- Contribute to a data-driven culture by clearly communicating findings and empowering stakeholders with reliable, accessible insights
Qualifications
- 3+ years of experience in data science or analytics, ideally with exposure to product-focused teams. Experience with recommendation and/or search ranking systems is a big plus.
- Strong Python and SQL knowledge; ability to write clean, reproducible code and work with large-scale datasets
- Experience with modern data tools, including dbt and Snowflake/Databricks for data modeling and transformation; Mixpanel or Segment for product analytics and event tracking; and Looker, Omni, or Tableau for visualization and dashboarding.
- Familiarity with common ML libraries (e.g. Scikit-learn, XGBoost); knowledge of deep learning frameworks like PyTorch is a bonus
- Experience applying and evaluating LLMs in practical, product-oriented settings (e.g., building or optimizing search, recommendations, or personalization tools)
- A strong analytical mindset with the ability to break down complex problems, design experiments, and generate actionable insights
- Comfortable collaborating cross-functionally with product, engineering, and design teams
Top Skills
Databricks
Dbt
Looker
Mixpanel
Omni
Python
PyTorch
Scikit-Learn
Segment
Snowflake
SQL
Tableau
Xgboost
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