Head of Applied Data Science - Hybrid AI/ML & Forecasting

AppFolio; Goleta (CA); On-site; USD 167,000 - 209,000; Full time

Job summary

AppFolio is seeking a Manager, Applied Data Science to lead the Data Scientists who build AI and ML products for the business, including our Next Best Action engine, Chat-to-Data analytics, and forecasting automations. You will be a player-coach, learning the business and data, then guiding the team to deliver production-ready models with emphasis on explainability and governance.

You will partner with Sales, Marketing, Customer Success, and Finance to set priorities, drive adoption, and

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in a STEM field and 8+ years building and deploying predictive models in production.
• 2+ years leading data scientists, as a people manager or as the technical lead who set direction, reviewed the work, and coached the people doing it.
• Strong programming background, with Python and SQL required. You have taken models you built from raw tables to production yourself and expect to keep building alongside your team.
• Experience developing, deploying, monitoring, and retraining classification and propensity models end to end, bonus points for recommending systems that arbitrate across several models.
• Experimental design fundamentals, including holdouts, control groups, power, and honest measurement of incremental lift rather than model accuracy alone.
• Experience building and evaluating LLM-based products in production, such as agents or natural-language analytics.
• Experience with a cloud data warehouse such as Snowflake, dbt, an orchestration framework such as Airflow, version control, and CRM data such as Salesforce.
• A record of setting priorities with senior leadership: turning ambiguous questions into repeatable models, communicating recommendations they act on, and saying no when the data does not support the ask.

Responsibilities

• Own signal modeling and scoring logic for all of AppFolio’s products, and co-create the Next Best Action layer for GTM teams that gives each account ranked recommendations per persona.
• Own shared data science services for the business, forecasting automations, agentic data access and partner with the business to ensure adoption and explainability.
• Own coding standards for the Cerberus model fleet: coding standards, review gates, deployment, monitoring, retraining, and outputs published to the governed Data Marts with the access controls and audit logging the Business Data Platform requires.
• Review every pull request and deliverable the team ships, and own the quality and risk of its models, analyses, recommendations and automations.
• Coordinate delivery with Sales, Marketing, Customer Success, and Finance leaders: set priorities with them, hold Data Science & Analytics’ seat on the cross functional working groups, and run the team’s operating rhythm so that urgent requests and the roadmap both get delivered.
• Set the direction for applied AI/ML in Data Science & Analytics with department leadership.
• Manage and grow a team of Data Scientists: 1:1s, coaching, performance reviews, hiring, and a growth path for each person.

Skills

Python

SQL

LLM-based products

Experimental design

Forecasting models

Team leadership

Education

Bachelor’s degree in STEM

Tools

Snowflake

dbt

Airflow

Salesforce

Job description

AppFolio is seeking a Manager, Applied Data Science to lead the Data Scientists who build AI and ML products for the business, including our Next Best Action engine, Chat-to-Data analytics, and forecasting automations. You will be a player-coach, learning the business and data, then guiding the team to deliver production-ready models with emphasis on explainability and governance.

You will partner with Sales, Marketing, Customer Success, and Finance to set priorities, drive adoption, and