Staff Data Scientist, Growth & Product AI Strategy

GoFundMe; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 179,500 - 269,500; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Make an Impact

Innovative Environment

Collaborative Team

Competitive Benefits

Holistic Support

Growth Opportunities

Commitment to DEI

Community Engagement

Job summary

GoFundMe is hiring a Staff Data Scientist in the San Francisco Bay Area to shape data science across marketing, growth, and product. You will lead high-impact workstreams, define technical strategy, and translate analyses into clear executive recommendations, partnering across Data, Marketing, Product, Growth, Finance, and Engineering.

You will mentor others, accelerate AI‑enabled workflows, and tackle audience, retention, personalization, and experimentation challenges to improve business

Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience leading data science, applied statistics, or machine learning projects with measurable business impact.
• Master’s degree or Ph.D. in a quantitative field, or equivalent applied experience coupled with a bachelor’s degree.
• Experience with marketing, growth, marketplace, and/or product optimization problems.
• Strong command of statistical inference, causal inference, uplift modeling, heterogeneous treatment effects, treatment/control frameworks, and incrementality measurement.
• Experience applying machine learning to targeting, personalization, segmentation, recommendation, lifecycle optimization, or similar problems.
• Familiarity with adaptive experimentation, including frequentist A/B tests, multi‑arm bandits, contextual bandits, and/or related optimization methods.
• Advanced proficiency with SQL and Python for data extraction, transformation, modeling, and analysis.
• Experience using AI‑assisted tools to increase the speed and quality of analysis, coding, iteration, and communication.
• Ability to define technical strategy, identify reusable patterns, and raise the quality of data science work across teams.
• Strong business judgment and stakeholder management skills.
• Excellent communication and storytelling skills, including experience presenting to executive audiences.
• Experience mentoring data scientists, analysts, or other technical team members.

Responsibilities

• Lead high‑impact data science initiatives across marketing, growth, and product, from problem definition through methodology, execution, interpretation, and recommendation.
• Define org-level technical strategy, identify high‑leverage opportunities, and establish best practices for experimentation, causal measurement, modeling, AI‑assisted development, and decision science.
• Design, analyze, and interpret experiments and quasi‑experiments; build scalable frameworks to estimate incrementality, treatment effects, and long‑term business value.
• Develop ML, uplift, heterogeneous treatment effect, and adaptive experimentation models to improve targeting, segmentation, personalization, lifecycle optimization, audience strategy, budget allocation, and product decisions.
• Partner with Marketing, Growth, Sales, Finance, and Product to evaluate acquisition, retention, ROI, user journeys, funnels, marketplace dynamics, donation conversion, and engagement.
• Use AI tools to accelerate prototyping, analysis, coding, debugging, documentation, and repetitive workflows without compromising quality, accuracy, or review standards.
• Translate complex analyses into clear recommendations for technical, non‑technical, and executive audiences.
• Collaborate with Data, Analytics, and Product Engineering to improve instrumentation, data quality, experimentation infrastructure, and reusable data science workflows.
• Mentor data scientists and analysts through design reviews, model reviews, methodology discussions, AI‑enabled workflows, and shared best practices.

Skills

Data science leadership

Communication

Mentoring

SQL

Python

AI tools

Marketing analytics

Education

Advanced degree or equivalent (MS/PhD)

Tools

SQL

Python

Job description

GoFundMe is hiring a Staff Data Scientist in the San Francisco Bay Area to shape data science across marketing, growth, and product. You will lead high-impact workstreams, define technical strategy, and translate analyses into clear executive recommendations, partnering across Data, Marketing, Product, Growth, Finance, and Engineering.

You will mentor others, accelerate AI‑enabled workflows, and tackle audience, retention, personalization, and experimentation challenges to improve business