Principal Data Scientist

The Principal Data Scientist is responsible for leading the technical implementation of bleeding edge AI products. You will be responsible for technical design, delivery and maintenance of a new machine learning platform that will support multiple business purposes and application features. To thrive in this role, you will execute well in an agile environment where we’ll depend on you to make pragmatic decisions, establish and use tight feedback loops, and take calculated risks based on your knowledge from collaborating with your peers. You’ve led technical design and mentored data scientists before, and are comfortable delivering and receiving feedback with trust and candor. You know that MyFitnessPal’s success is dependent on the success of the entire data science team, and you’re committed to coach and mentor a team of experienced engineers and data scientists.

This is an individual contributor role with strong mentorship expectations and the potential for people management based on the candidate.

About our team:
MyFitnessPal encourages innovation and adoption of the latest technologies available to deliver an amazing experience for our members. Our diverse team of brilliant technologists builds and maintains native mobile applications, a web application, the world’s largest nutrition database, constantly evolving data science and AI/ML assets, the backend infrastructure and data platform required to support these applications and databases, as well as the business systems and data required to manage an awesome company. Technologies, services and/or languages we work with: MySQL, Snowflake, Databricks, Elasticsearch, Python, SQL, Kubernetes, Docker, Scale.ai, AWS Ground Truth, Doccano.

What you’ll be doing:

• Be a hands-on leader of data scientists and ML engineers responsible for the technical design, build and maintenance of ML models that drive a personalized experience throughout the MyFitnessPal user journey
• Promote the professional growth and happiness of teammates through mentorship, coaching, and encouraging positive, fearless, and trust-based collaboration
• Evaluate and improve existing systems to provide more robust solutions that allow others to move quickly and efficiently
• Partner with product engineering, data engineering, and data operations to ensure the team adopts best practices for code development, DataOps/MLOps, testing, data quality, and quality assurance
• Support resolution of production issues with ML model-driven production features
• Work with our engineering, data science, product and leadership teams in support of MyFitnessPal to solve critical user problems. This is a broad surface area and uses a variety of technologies
• Hold others accountable while demonstrating integrity and compassion
• Live our core values in all you do:
  • Be Kind and Care
  • Live Good Health
  • Be Data-Inspired
  • Champion Change
  • Leave it Better than You Found It
  • Make It Happen

Qualifications to be successful in this role:

• 10+ years of machine learning experience in a production setting, with extensive experience in NLP, personalization/ranking, and/or deep learning
• Deep knowledge of AI architectures, ML algorithms, and generative AI and LLMs
• Demonstrated AI/ML product development from inception to deployment and maintenance
• Experience working and innovating on a centralized Machine Learning platform supporting multiple production features / models
• A high degree of technical understanding to be able to closely collaborate with engineers and ML practitioners and being additive in strategic discussions about MFP’s future product offering
• Excellent written communication skills and ability to present technical content to non-technical audiences. Ability to partner with different functions to ensure that your solutions drive real business impact
• Strategic thinking and ability to incorporate larger business context into algorithm and product development
• Help other teammates grow through mentorship and coaching
• Can quickly assess complex problems and facilitate group discussions to identify solutions and generate appropriate milestones and tasks
• Have a solid understanding of what it takes to build production ML-models used in consumer applications
• Strong proficiency in programming languages such as Python, R, and SQL
• Have a Master’s degree or Ph.D. in Computer Science, Data Science, Statistics, Mathematics, or a related field (or otherwise equivalent and extensive real-world experience)