Senior Data Scientist

Zonos; Saint George (UT); On-site; USD 200,000 - 275,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Relocation assistance

Medical, Dental, Vision & Life

Paid parental leave

401k retirement plan

4 weeks vacation

Employee Assistance Program

1 month paid time off at 5 year anniv.

Office snacks & drinks

Weekly company lunch

Job summary

Zonos, the AI operating system for cross-border trade, is hiring a data scientist to solve classification, valuation, and risk problems. You will work with multilingual product and shipment data, build robust ML/LLM solutions, and ship production-grade Python and SQL code under the guidance of the Chief Data Scientist.

This on-site role in St. George, Utah, offers relocation support and a strong focus on right-tool selection, rigorous experiments, and measurable impact on key metrics across 200+

Qualifications

• 5+ years of hands-on data science work with a Bachelor's degree, or 3+ years with a Master's or PhD, including projects that ran in production.
• Strong depth in statistics: inference, experimental design, and uncertainty.
• Practical experience with ML and NLP, including fine-tuning, embeddings, evaluation, and text classification at scale.
• Strong Python and SQL proficiency.

Responsibilities

• Own data problems at the heart of the product, such as classification, valuation, risk, and compliance; choose the approach (statistical modeling, ML/LLMs, optimization, or simple rules).
• Work with multilingual product and shipment data; interpret what it actually says before modeling.
• Quantify uncertainty and decide when to act or route work to a human; assess cost of errors.
• Design evaluations and experiments to prove outcomes; ensure rigorous analyses.
• Write production-quality Python and SQL code, then ship, monitor, and iterate on what you build.
• Join on-call rotations and debug in production, including real-traffic edge cases.
• Bring rigor to product and business decisions beyond your own projects.

Skills

ML & NLP

Python

SQL

Statistics

Education

Bachelor's degree in a quantitative field

Master's or PhD in related field

Job description

Zonos is the AI operating system for cross-border trade, powering everything from checkout to customs clearance for more than 50,000 ecommerce merchants and 70+ postal operators across 200+ countries. We help businesses grow globally by removing the complexity of international commerce—calculating, collecting, and guaranteeing duties, taxes, and fees at checkout so shoppers see the true total cost upfront, eliminating surprise charges at delivery and the burden of managing country-specific tax requirements. Beyond ecommerce, Zonos supports carriers, postal operators, marketplaces, and customs agencies with AI-driven tools that infer and validate key customs data, including HS codes, country of origin, and customs value, alongside licensed customs brokerage services that ensure goods move compliantly and efficiently across borders.

Overview

Behind almost every part of that is a data problem. Inferring an HS code from a messy product title, estimating customs value, deciding when an answer is confident enough to guarantee, spotting the shipments that need a human, and pricing risk across 200+ countries all have real financial and regulatory consequences.

We're hiring a data scientist who solves problems and ships the solution. Sometimes that's a fine-tuned LLM. Sometimes it's a Bayesian model, a well-designed experiment, an optimization, a simulation, or a 30-line rule that beats everything else. We want someone with the whole toolbelt and the judgment to pick the right tool. Cleverness for its own sake doesn't interest us.

You'll report directly to our Chief Data Scientist and work side by side with engineering, taking problems from "fuzzy and important" to something running in production that customers rely on.

How we work

Zonos doesn't have product managers. At the senior level, you talk to customers and internal teams directly, understand the problem, decide what's worth solving and how, and ship it. Part of the job is judgment: pushing back, proposing a simpler approach, or saying the data doesn't support the decision. Disagreements get resolved quickly and in writing, with clear owners.

Life in St. George UT

This role is on-site at our headquarters in St. George, Utah, where our team enjoys Southern Utah's 300 days of sunshine each year. Snow Canyon State Park is minutes away, Zion National Park is about an hour's drive, and Las Vegas is about two. Relocation assistance is available for candidates moving here.

What you'll do

• Own data problems at the heart of the product, such as classification, valuation, risk, and compliance. Choose the approach, whether that's statistical modeling, classical ML, deep learning and LLMs, optimization, or a simple rule.
• Work with messy, multilingual product and shipment data. Figure out what it actually says before modeling anything.
• Quantify uncertainty and make it useful. Decide when we're confident enough to act, when to route work to a human, and what each error costs.
• Design the evaluations, experiments, and analyses that tell us whether something actually worked, and hold the line when it didn't.
• Write production-quality Python and SQL, then ship, monitor, and iterate on what you build.
• Join the on-call rotation and debug in production, including the subtle failures that only show up on real traffic.
• Bring rigor to product and business decisions beyond your own projects.

You might be a great fit if you...

• Reach for the right tool, not the newest one. You can explain why you chose a GLM over a transformer, or a heuristic over both, and tell us how it played out.
• Own the full loop. You've framed a problem, built the solution, shipped it, and stayed with it after launch.
• Can point to impact. You've shipped work that moved a real metric, and you can tell us which one and how you measured it.
• Write code engineers are happy to merge. You explore in notebooks, and you ship clean, tested code.
• Lead with product judgment. You ask "should we solve this?" before "how do we solve this?"
• Want to live and work in sunny St. George, Utah, with a real work-life balance.
• You also bring:
  • 5+ years of hands-on data science work with a Bachelor's degree, or 3+ years with a Master's or PhD, including things you built that ran in production.
  • Real depth in statistics: inference, experimental design, and uncertainty. You understand what the numbers mean, not just how to produce them.
  • Practical experience with ML and LLMs/NLP, including fine-tuning, embeddings, evaluation, and text classification at scale.
  • Strong Python and SQL.
• Nice to have: optimization or operations research, causal inference, forecasting, Bayesian methods, serving models on GPUs, and experience with trade, customs, logistics, ecommerce, or payments data.

What we offer

• Compensation: $200,000–$275,000 annual base salary, depending on experience and demonstrated impact. If your compensation expectations fall outside this range, we'd still love to hear from you. We're focused on finding the right person and are willing to be flexible for exceptional talent.
• Relocation assistance is available for candidates relocating to St. George, Utah.
• Medical, Dental, Vision, & Life - we pay 100% of the employee premium!
• Paid parental leave and other life event leave
• 401k retirement plan with generous company match
• 4 weeks of vacation, plus sick and other paid time off. Take some time to relax!
• Employee Assistance Program
• 1 month paid time off at 5 year anniversary
• Office stocked with snacks and drinks
• Weekly company lunch