Data Science Lead — Hands-on Team Builder (Hybrid/Remote)

Elliptic; Washington; Hybrid; USD 160,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Healthcare

401k

Hybrid work

Remote work budget

L&D budget

Holidays

Birthday leave

Parental leave

Job summary

Elliptic is seeking a lead data scientist to guide data science within the Intelligence team. You will drive a small team, own model governance, and stay hands-on while shaping the data foundation for how compliance works with autonomous systems.

This is a leadership role requiring mentoring, hiring, and cross-functional collaboration in a remote-friendly hybrid setup in Washington, DC or willing to relocate.

Qualifications

• AI fluency essential; ability to apply AI tools in data science workflow.
• Experience managing data scientists or ML engineers; setting objectives and developing people.
• Experience hiring into a technical team and defining hiring bars.
• Deep, hands-on data science and ML capability; able to interrogate datasets and defend methods.
• Clear communication with technical and non-technical stakeholders; cascade direction to a team.
• Experience with a modern data stack (cloud data lake, Spark/Databricks, AWS).
• Based in Washington, DC or willing to relocate; US citizenship.
• Demonstrated track record delivering datasets, models, or capabilities in uncertain domains.

Responsibilities

• Lead and grow the data science team; set objectives and development plans.
• Hire data scientists; define job descriptions, plan interviews and panels.
• Define data collection requirements for future compliance capabilities.
• Own model governance; maintain inventory, validations, and remediation.
• Frame research questions and present defensible views to leadership.
• Stay hands-on; review team work and contribute code when it matters.
• Maintain reliability and trade-offs of core data science outputs.
• Collaborate with Intelligence, Product, and Engineering to land data science as platform capability.
• Set AI working standards for verification and governance.

Skills

AI fluency

People management

Hiring experience

Hands-on ML

Clear communication

Data governance

Strategic thinking

US citizenship

Education

PhD or equivalent

Tools

Python

SQL

AWS

Databricks

Job description

Elliptic is seeking a lead data scientist to guide data science within the Intelligence team. You will drive a small team, own model governance, and stay hands-on while shaping the data foundation for how compliance works with autonomous systems.

This is a leadership role requiring mentoring, hiring, and cross-functional collaboration in a remote-friendly hybrid setup in Washington, DC or willing to relocate.