Director, Data Science

Meredith Corporation; United States; Remote; USD 175,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical coverage

Dental coverage

Vision coverage

Unlimited PTO

Tuition reimbursement

401K with company match

Job summary

People Inc. is seeking a Director of Data Science to lead customer intelligence and personalization across our entertainment brands. You will build models for lifecycle value, analyze cross-channel engagement, and collaborate with Product, Editorial, and Marketing to translate insights into product improvements.

The role focuses on mobile app experiences, automated marketing, and experimentation, with an emphasis on scalable data solutions and measurable business impact.

Qualifications

• PhD or advanced degree in a quantitative field or equivalent experience.
• 7+ years in data science and ML focusing on customer behavior, product analytics, and marketing problems.
• 5+ years leading a team of data scientists.

Responsibilities

• Lead and grow a data science team to develop predictive models for customer lifetime value.
• Analyze customer interactions across app, web, social, email to optimize engagement.
• Own product funnel and engagement analytics including onboarding, adoption, and retention.
• Develop segmentation models to identify high-value users and inform content recommendations.
• Collaborate with Product and Editorial to translate insights into differentiated app experiences.
• Design online A/B tests to measure impact of product changes and personalization.
• Foster cross-department collaboration and advocate for data capabilities.
• Align data initiatives with company objectives.

Skills

Data science leadership

Customer behavior focus

Strong communication

Product analytics

Experimental design

Education

PhD or advanced degree

Tools

Python

SQL

BigQuery

Claude Code/Codex

Job description

Job Title: Director, Data Science

Job Description

About the Position

People Inc. is America’s largest print and digital publisher, reaching tens of millions of readers every day. We’re hiring a Director of Data Science to lead customer intelligence and personalization for our entertainment brands, helping shape products and experiences that inform, engage, and inspire our audiences. In this role, you’ll build a deeper understanding of our customers across product engagement, marketing response, and lifecycle behavior. You’ll partner closely with Product, Marketing, and Editorial teams to turn data into actionable insights that drive growth, while working with Data Operations and Engineering to ensure our models, measurement systems, and insights can scale effectively. You’ll apply statistical modeling and machine learning to product and marketing challenges across customer segmentation, acquisition, engagement, retention, and lifetime value, with a particular focus on mobile app experiences. You’ll own models and analyses that support personalization, automated marketing, attribution, experimentation, and lifecycle optimization across apps, newsletters, and other customer touchpoints, translating complex audience behavior into clear recommendations and measurable business impact.

Schedule Requirements

In-office Expectations: This position is fully remote with no in-office requirements, (might require coming into an office periodically for team meetings, etc.)

About the Team

People Inc. is the largest premium publisher in the world. Every day, tens of millions of people come to us for help and inspiration. Our library of hundreds of thousands of articles helps our users understand how to deal with day-to-day challenges. You will work with a team of data scientists, collaborating with cross-functional groups to leverage this incredible dataset to understand both our content and our users’ needs. This knowledge will be used to identify and build out new products that leverage the behavioral information within our extensive data.

Position Contributions

• Lead and grow a data science team to develop predictive models that estimate customer lifetime value using advanced statistical and machine learning techniques.
• Analyze and understand customer interactions across app, web, social media, and email touchpoints to identify and optimize engagement opportunities.
• Own product funnel and engagement analysis, including onboarding completion, feature adoption, feature stickiness, and session behavior, as distinct from marketing-funnel metrics such as acquisition and retention.
• Leverage data-driven insights to build customer segmentation models, identifying high-value users and informing content and product recommendations.
• Partner with Product and Editorial teams to translate user understanding into differentiated experiences across the app, newsletters, and other customer interactions, feeding insights directly into the product development cycle. This includes the sizing of opportunities and assessment of product success.
• Design online A/B testing experiments to measure the impact of product changes, personalization, and full-funnel marketing interventions.
• Ensure effective collaboration between data science teams and other departments.
• Advocate for resources and tools to advance data capabilities.
• Align data initiatives with company objectives.

Minimum Qualifications and Job Requirements

• Education: PhD or advanced degree in Data Science, Economics, Business Analytics, Mathematics, Statistics, or similar quantitative field, or equivalent experience.
• Experience: 7+ years of experience in data science and machine learning with a strong focus in the area of customer behavior, product analytics, and marketing-focused problems.
• 5+ years of experience leading a team of data scientists.
• Ability to lead product and funnel analytics on web and mobile platforms with a focus on providing actionable insights, not just data outputs.
• Solid foundation in causal inference, survival analysis, and time series analysis, especially as applied to marketing and customer behavior.
• Strong proficiency in Python and SQL for data analysis and model development.
• Familiarity with Claude Code/Codex and how they can be used reliably (and where they fail) in a data science workflow.
• Strong strategic and operational capabilities.
• Excellent leadership and communication skills.
• Ability to communicate complex analyses clearly to non-technical marketing and business stakeholders.
• Drives adoption of new data science methods and technologies to continually expand what the product can do.

Specific Knowledge, Skills, Certifications and Abilities

• Experience with large-scale search and recommendation systems in media, e-commerce, or advertising space.
• Experience working with large-scale analytics platforms (e.g., BigQuery).
• Exposure to reinforcement learning or bandit approaches for personalization or offer optimization.
• Advanced experimentation techniques, including multivariate testing, factorial designs, and CUPED.
• Experience with Bayesian statistical methods for inference and decision-making under uncertainty.
• Experience with forecasting models and advanced lifecycle or retention modeling.
• Applied NLP experience for content classification, semantic search, or audience understanding.
• Track record of leading end-to-end data science projects from problem framing through deployment and impact measurement.
• Confidence and pride in representing Data Science as a strategic partner to Marketing and other business teams.

Travel

% Travel Required (Approximate): ~5%, ability to travel periodically/quarterly for team meetings/events preferred but flexible based on candidate needs.

Equal Employment Opportunity

It is the policy of People Inc. to provide equal employment opportunity (EEO) to all persons regardless of age, color, national origin, citizenship status, physical or mental disability, race, religion, creed, gender, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity and/or expression, genetic information, marital status, status with regard to public assistance, veteran status or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local law. In addition, the Company will provide reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities. Accommodation requests can be made by emailing [e-mail]. The Company participates in the federal E-Verify program to confirm the identity and employment authorization of all newly hired employees. For further information about the E-Verify program, please click here: https://www.e-verify.gov/employees.

Pay Range Salary

Remote: $175,000.00 - $210,000.00 The pay range above represents the anticipated low and high end of the pay range for this position and may change in the future. Actual pay may vary and may be above or below the range based on various factors including but not limited to work location, experience, and performance. The range listed is just one component of People Inc's total compensation package for employees. Other compensation may include annual bonuses, and short‑and‑long‑term incentives.

Benefits

• Medical coverage
• Dental coverage
• Vision coverage
• Prescription drug coverage
• Unlimited paid time off (PTO)
• Adoption or surrogate assistance
• Donation matching
• Tuition reimbursement
• Basic life insurance
• Basic accidental death & dismemberment
• Supplemental life insurance
• Supplemental accident insurance
• Commuter benefits
• Short term and long term disability
• Health savings and flexible spending accounts
• Family care benefits
• A generous 401K savings plan with a company match program
• 10-12 paid holidays annually
• Generous paid parental leave (birthing and non-birthing parents)
• Pet insurance
• Accident, critical and hospital indemnity health insurance coverage
• Life and disability insurance

About the Company

People Inc. is America’s largest digital and print publisher. Our 40+ iconic and fast’growing brands harness the best intent’driven content, the fastest sites, and the fewest ads to help nearly 200 million people every month, including 95 percent of US women, make decisions, take action, and find inspiration. People Inc. brands include PEOPLE, Better Homes & Gardens, Verywell, FOOD & WINE, The Spruce, Allrecipes, Byrdie, REAL SIMPLE, Investopedia, Southern Living and more.