Senior Manager, Applied Data Science & AI

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

Job summary

AppFolio is seeking a senior data scientist in Goleta, CA to lead predictive modeling and the Next Best Action layer for GTM teams. You will own signal modeling, data science services, and the Cerberus model fleet standards across production fintech-like products.

You will manage a team of data scientists, collaborate with Sales, Marketing, CS, and Finance, and shape applied AI/ML direction. Strong Python/SQL, leadership, and production ML experience required.

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 designing next-best-action or recommendation 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, including the accuracy and coverage checks that gate their use.
• 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

People leadership

Model deployment

LLM-based products

Experiment design

Production ML monitoring

Communicate with leadership

Education

Bachelor’s degree in STEM field

Tools

Snowflake

dbt

Airflow

Salesforce

Git

Job description

AppFolio is seeking a senior data scientist in Goleta, CA to lead predictive modeling and the Next Best Action layer for GTM teams. You will own signal modeling, data science services, and the Cerberus model fleet standards across production fintech-like products.

You will manage a team of data scientists, collaborate with Sales, Marketing, CS, and Finance, and shape applied AI/ML direction. Strong Python/SQL, leadership, and production ML experience required.