Lead Data Scientist: AI Ad Tech & Generative ML

ESPN; Seattle (WA); On-site; USD 170,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

ESPN Product & Technology is seeking a Lead Data Scientist to advance advertising tech across its global platforms. You will design ML models, build data pipelines, and drive measurable impact on ad decisioning and performance.

You will mentor teammates, partner with product managers and engineers, and help scale generative AI and mixed-media capabilities for efficient ad creation and optimization across ESPN’s sports content ecosystem.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s in computer science, statistics or equivalent experience.
• 7+ years of data science experience at leading internet or creative technology companies; advertising domain bonus.
• Experience creating ML datasets and rigorous dataset labeling or evaluation processes.
• Strong interest to learn about generative mixed media, generative video, and diffusion-based technology.
• Proficient in SQL, Python, Java, or R; familiar with Tableau or other visualization tools.

Responsibilities

• Drive innovation and apply data science and statistics to advertising, including inventory forecasting, ad experience, pacing, pricing, targeting, creation and delivery.
• Translate business questions into data science frameworks; develop data analysis and models with fast turnaround.
• Develop rigorous evaluation pipelines for generative AI technologies (image/video and LLM-based).
• Define and evaluate key metrics across product areas.
• Partner with generative AI specialists to create datasets for modeling applications.
• Deliver data insights and data-driven recommendations to cross-team stakeholders.
• Design and analyze A/B tests for ML iterations.
• Establish partnerships with product managers, engineers and program managers; mentor team members.

Skills

SQL

Python

Java

R

Data visualization

Communication

Machine learning

Experimentation

Education

Bachelor’s in CS/Statistics or equivalent

Tools

Airflow

Databricks

Sagemaker

Tableau

Job description

ESPN Product & Technology is seeking a Lead Data Scientist to advance advertising tech across its global platforms. You will design ML models, build data pipelines, and drive measurable impact on ad decisioning and performance.

You will mentor teammates, partner with product managers and engineers, and help scale generative AI and mixed-media capabilities for efficient ad creation and optimization across ESPN’s sports content ecosystem.