Head of Data Science

Rebel Foods; Mumbai; On-site; INR 4,500,000 - 7,000,000; Full time

Job summary

Rebel Foods is seeking a Lead – Data Scientist to build and lead a world-class DS team that drives business outcomes at scale.

This high-ownership, player-coach role requires strategic thinking, rapid experimentation, and production-grade ML deployment across supply, operations, and demand channels.

Qualifications

• 9+ years of experience in Data Science / Machine Learning, with 2+ years of leading teams or managing high-performing DS/ML groups.
• Proven track record of shipping ML systems to production that delivered measurable business impact at scale.
• Strong experience in applied machine learning, statistical modeling, and optimization.

Responsibilities

• Set the bar for what great looks like in applied Data Science and ML execution across the organization.
• Define and drive the Data Science roadmap by identifying high-impact problems worth solving.
• Lead, hire, and grow a high-caliber team of Data Scientists / ML Engineers with a culture of ownership and urgency.
• Own end-to-end delivery of ML initiatives—from business framing to deployment and monitoring.
• Act as a player-coach: unblock teams, review modeling approaches, and contribute hands-on when needed.
• Partner with Product, Engineering, and Business leaders to align on priorities and drive adoption of solutions.
• Build production-grade, scalable ML systems with strong engineering rigor.
• Drive a high-velocity experimentation culture with measurable business impact.
• Establish best practices across ML lifecycle and governance.

Skills

Python

SQL

Pandas

NumPy

Machine Learning

Deep Learning

Time-Series Forecasting

NLP

A/B Testing

MLOps

Tools

PyTorch

TensorFlow/Keras

Scikit-learn

Docker

REST APIs

Plotly/Matplotlib

Job description

About Us

We are surrounded by the world's leading consumer companies led by technology - Amazon for retail, Airbnb for hospitality, Uber for mobility, Netflix and Spotify for entertainment, etc. Food & Beverage is the only consumer sector where large players are still traditional restaurant companies. At Rebel Foods, we are challenging this status quo as we are building the world's most valuable restaurant company on the internet, superfast.

The opportunity for us is immense due to the exponential growth in the food delivery business worldwide which has helped us build 'The World's Largest Internet Restaurant Company' in the last few years. Rebel Foods' current presence in India & UAE with close to 50 brands and 4500+ internet restaurants has been built on The Rebel Operating System.

While for us it is still Day 1, we know we are in the middle of a revolution towards creating never seen before customer-first experiences. We bring you a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to disrupt the 500-year-old industry with technology at its core.

We urge you to refer to the below to understand how we are changing the restaurant industry before applying at Rebel Foods.

https://spirit.rebelfoods.com/why-is-rebel-foods-hiring-super-talented-engineers-b88586223ebe

https://spirit.rebelfoods.com/how-to-build-1000-restaurants-in-24-months-the-rebel-method-cb5b0cea4dc8

https://spirit.rebelfoods.com/winning-the-last-frontier-for-consumer-internet-5f2a659c43db

https://spirit.rebelfoods.com/a-unique-take-on-food-tech-dcef8c51ba41

Job Description:

We are looking for an exceptional Lead – Data Scientist to build and lead a world-class Data Science team that drives meaningful business outcomes at scale

.This is not a pure people-management role. This is a high-ownership, player-coach role for someone who can think strategically, execute aggressively, and lead from the front. You will be expected to identify the highest-leverage opportunities across the business, shape the ML roadmap, drive rapid experimentation, and ship production-grade ML systems that materially move core metrics

.You should have a strong track record of building and deploying machine learning systems in production, leading high-performing teams, and solving ambiguous, high-impact business problems. You should be comfortable switching between leadership, architecture, hands-on debugging, stakeholder alignment, and execution review — sometimes on the same day

.If you’re excited by messy real-world problems, high scale, fast decisions, and building with intensity, this role is for you.

What our team owns

At Rebel, the Data Science & Analytics team owns the intelligence layer for the company.

We build and maintain the AI based solutions, ML models, optimization systems, rule engines, and decision frameworks that power critical business outcomes across the organization. This includes:

• Demand and inventory forecasting
• Order volume prediction
• Marketing spend optimization and attribution
• Delivery time prediction and logistics intelligence
• Personalization and recommendation systems
• Capacity planning and operational optimization
• Pricing and assortment intelligence
• Automated business reporting and decision support

We work across nearly every major business function — Supply, Operations, Demand Generation, D2C, Finance, Brands, Customer Delight, Central Planning, and more.

The problems are real, large-scale, cross-functional, and deeply operational. The impact is visible. The feedback loops are fast. The opportunity to create leverage is massive.

We’re looking for someone who can

• Set the bar for what great looks like in applied Data Science and ML execution across the organization.
• Define and drive the Data Science roadmap by identifying the highest-impact problems worth solving, not just the loudest asks.
• Lead, hire, and grow a high-caliber team of Data Scientists / ML Engineers with a culture of ownership, urgency, and technical excellence.
• Own end-to-end delivery of ML initiatives — from business framing and experimentation to deployment, monitoring, and continuous improvement.
• Act as a player-coach: unblock teams, review modeling approaches, challenge assumptions, and go hands-on when the situation demands it.
• Partner deeply with Product, Engineering, and Business leaders to align on priorities, define success metrics, and drive adoption of solutions.
• Build production-grade, scalable, and reusable ML systems with strong engineering rigor and long-term maintainability.
• Drive a high-velocity experimentation culture with clear hypotheses, measurable outcomes, and ruthless focus on business impact.
• Establish best practices across the ML lifecycle — feature engineering, validation, deployment, monitoring, retraining, governance, and documentation.
• Push the team beyond dashboards and incremental models into decision automation, optimization, and durable intelligence systems.
• Communicate clearly and influence decisively, especially in ambiguous or high-stakes cross-functional situations.
• Raise the organization’s ML maturity by improving trust, adoption, and understanding of Data Science across teams.

Specific Qualifications

• 9+ years of experience in Data Science / Machine Learning, with 2+ years of leading teams or managing high-performing DS/ML groups.
• Proven track record of shipping ML systems to production that delivered measurable business impact at scale.
• Strong experience in applied machine learning, statistical modeling, and optimization, especially in fast-moving business environments.
• Deep hands-on expertise with ML frameworks and libraries such as PyTorch, TensorFlow/Keras, Scikit-learn.
• Strong understanding of core ML methods including:
  • Regression
  • Classification
  • Tree-based / Gradient Boosting models
  • Time-Series Forecasting
  • Ranking / Recommendation systems
  • NLP
  • Optimization and decision systems
• Strong proficiency in Python, SQL, Pandas, NumPy, and data analysis / visualization libraries such as Matplotlib, Plotly, etc.
• Experience building robust ML workflows including:
  • Feature engineering pipelines
  • Offline / online evaluation
  • Experiment design and A/B testing
  • Model deployment and serving
  • Monitoring and retraining strategies
• Strong understanding of MLOps and production engineering, including:
  • Dockerization
  • REST APIs
  • CI/CD for ML workflows
  • Version control and reproducibility
  • Scalable inference and model lifecycle management
• Experience with optimization frameworks (e.g. Google OR-Tools) is a strong plus.
• Strong intuition for balancing speed vs rigor, and the judgment to know when each matters.
• Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills, with the ability to challenge, influence, and align senior cross-functional leaders.

Good-to-have

• Experience in Time-Series Forecasting, Market Mix Modeling (MMM), Causal Inference, or Experimentation Platforms.
• Experience in personalization, recommendation systems, pricing, logistics, supply chain, or operational optimization.
• Experience building ML platforms, reusable modeling frameworks, or internal DS productivity tooling.
• Prior experience in consumer internet, e-commerce, food-tech, logistics, mobility, or other high-scale operational businesses.
• Strong bias toward building systems that create compounding leverage, not one-off analyses.
• Passion for raising the technical bar and building teams that attract top-tier talent.

Learn more about Rebel

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