Senior Data Scientist — LLM Applications (Early Hire)

Socket.dev; New York (NY); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Socket.dev is seeking a Data Scientist to join as one of our earliest hires, working directly with the founders on key technical decisions from day one. You will implement, evaluate, and improve agentic AI applications and help shape the product roadmap using rigorous benchmarking and real-world deployment.

The role emphasizes building with models, not just building models, and requires deep expertise in compound AI systems, agentic collaboration, and practical tooling (ChatGPT, Cursor, Notebook

Qualifications

• 8+ years experience designing and evaluating LLM-based applications.
• Ability to interpret statistical insights for non-technical audiences (executives).
• Strong programming skills and data analysis capabilities.

Responsibilities

• Evals and Optimization: develop evaluation methods and prompt/context optimization for LLM-based apps.
• Applied Research 0→0 System Design: integrate models and proprietary data into AI-native workflows with benchmarking.
• Exploratory Research – Bold, Big Bets: explore recent advances and drive state-of-the-art opportunities.
• Data-driven investment decisions: apply statistics and ML to sourcing, screening, due diligence, and asset monitoring.

Skills

Experience Building with Models

Uses AI Every Day

Strong Programming & Data Analysis

Biases Towards Showing vs. Telling

Tools

ChatGPT

Cursor

Notebook LM

Claude Code

Job description

Socket.dev is seeking a Data Scientist to join as one of our earliest hires, working directly with the founders on key technical decisions from day one. You will implement, evaluate, and improve agentic AI applications and help shape the product roadmap using rigorous benchmarking and real-world deployment.

The role emphasizes building with models, not just building models, and requires deep expertise in compound AI systems, agentic collaboration, and practical tooling (ChatGPT, Cursor, Notebook