Staff Data Scientist

Role Overview

Our Data Science team uses data, machine learning, and large language models to power smarter products and more intuitive knowledge discovery. We’re looking for a Staff Data Scientist who’s excited about leading ambitious, high-impact work, partnering closely with product and engineering teams, and helping define the future of knowledge discovery in the AI era.

In this role, you’ll lead data science initiatives that span multiple product teams across Stack Overflow and Stack Internal, moving across teams as the work requires. You’ll stay hands-on with the hardest technical questions, guide work across the full data science lifecycle, and help teams make better product, technical, and business decisions with data.

What you’ll do

• Lead data science initiatives spanning multiple product teams, turning ambiguous needs into tractable problems
• Stay hands-on in analysis, experimentation, model development, and evaluation, especially where scientific uncertainty is highest
• Define what good looks like, design offline evaluations that are representative of production settings, ensure proper online product measurement to make clear product, technical, and business recommendations
• Translate needs for upstream data, downstream integration, model serving, and monitoring into clear requirements for engineering partners
• Balance product deadlines with deeper research and innovation, using thin slices and clear learning milestones to move uncertain work forward
• Partner with Product, Engineering, and business stakeholders to explain capabilities, limitations, and tradeoffs; challenge assumptions constructively and help teams make informed decisions
• Identify repeated work and develop shared methods or tools where they can accelerate future experimentation and deployment
• Mentor data scientists and engineers interested in ML, helping build stronger data science, ML, and AI understanding across the organization

What you’ll bring

• 7+ years of relevant experience, including a track record of leading ambiguous, production-facing data science or ML initiatives across multiple teams
• Hands-on experience building and evaluating ML systems, including LLM-powered applications; fine-tuning, SFT, or other language-model development experience is a plus
• A strong understanding of the full data science and ML lifecycle, including data and instrumentation needs, offline and online evaluation, production handoffs, monitoring, and iteration
• Strong analytical and modeling skills, especially when working with large or unstructured datasets
• Excellent stakeholder leadership — able to turn evidence into clear recommendations, educate different audiences, and influence or challenge decisions without formal authority 
• Sound judgment when balancing near-term product delivery with deeper research and technical uncertainty
• Experience mentoring data scientists or engineers

Why join now?

Stack Overflow has shaped how developers learn and solve problems for over eighteen years. That foundation of trusted, human-verified knowledge is now central to how enterprises are building their AI capabilities. This role puts you at the center of that transformation, helping customers connect their internal knowledge to the AI tools their teams use every day. Professional Services is a core part of how we deliver on that mission. For the right leader, this is a career-defining opportunity to build something meaningful at a company developers actually care about.