Staff Data Scientist, Grant — AI & Experimentation Leader

Kikoff; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 265,000 - 306,000; Full time

Job summary

Kikoff is seeking a staff data scientist to lead data work for the Grant product area and guide company-wide data science practices. You will define metrics, run experiments, build models, and influence decisions with executives. You’ll shape the data strategy across Kikoff and advance AI-enabled analytics.

You will collaborate with product, engineering, and marketing to define questions, collect evidence, and drive measurable outcomes for scale.

Qualifications

• Experience partnering with product, engineering, and marketing peers across the whole arc of the work: strategy, goal setting, approach, and execution, not just the analysis at the end.
• A track record of defining metrics from scratch and getting a team to run on them.
• Designed and run experimentation programs, including changes where clean randomization wasn't available.
• Comfortable with quasi-experimental and causal inference methods, and clear about their limits.
• Hands-on with production-quality SQL and Python.
• You build pipelines, analyses, and models yourself.
• Experience building or working closely with models that drive decisions in a product, in any domain: ranking, fraud, forecasting, personalization, underwriting, detection.
• AI tools are a core part of your daily analytical work and you can show how they changed the speed and quality of what you ship.
• You drive decisions with data in front of executive audiences, including when the data doesn't support the plan.

Responsibilities

• Lead the data work for a Grant product area: set the questions worth answering, build the evidence, and drive what happens next. Sometimes the right call is not to act on a finding, and you'll make that case too.
• Define and maintain the measurement system for your product area (acquisition, activation, usage, repayment, losses, unit economics) and contribute to the Grant-wide measurement framework alongside the other data scientists on the team.
• Own product experimentation for your area: design, guardrails, analysis, and the recommendation on rollouts and policy changes (eligibility, limits, pricing), including changes where clean randomization isn't available.
• Build and evaluate models where they're the right tool: proof-of-concept and challenger models, offline evaluation, threshold and policy decisions, and production monitoring with engineering. The ML platform and production model lifecycle sit with our ML engineering team; how data and engineering divide that work is still evolving and you'll have a voice in it.
• Partner with Grant's business lead and the area leads on roadmap and objectives: which bets, what a win looks like, and what we'd need to see to stop.
• As a staff data scientist, contribute to technical direction and best practices for data science across Kikoff, not just Grant: how we do experimentation, how we use AI tooling, how we review each other's work.

Skills

Cross-functional collaboration

Metrics definition

Experimentation

Causal inference

SQL

Python

Pipelines

Analyses

Models

AI tooling

Data storytelling

Tools

SQL

Python

Job description

Kikoff is seeking a staff data scientist to lead data work for the Grant product area and guide company-wide data science practices. You will define metrics, run experiments, build models, and influence decisions with executives. You’ll shape the data strategy across Kikoff and advance AI-enabled analytics.

You will collaborate with product, engineering, and marketing to define questions, collect evidence, and drive measurable outcomes for scale.