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About This Role
Gopuff delivers everyday essentials in minutes from our own network of micro-fulfillment centers. Every session, a customer sees a small, fast-changing assortment that depends on where they are, what's in stock, and what they need right now. Getting that experience right is one of our biggest levers for growth.
As Principal Data Scientist, Consumer, you will be the technical lead for how Gopuff personalizes the shopping experience. You will design and ship the recommendation, ranking, and personalization models behind search, browse, carts, and marketing, and you will lead our work on agentic AI experiences for consumers. You will set technical direction, mentor data scientists, and partner closely with Product, Engineering, and Marketing leaders.
What We Offer
- Medical/Dental/Vision Insurance
- 401(k) Retirement Savings Plan
- HSA or FSA eligibility
- Long and Short-Term Disability Insurance
- Fitness Reimbursement Program
- 25% employee discount & FAM Membership
- Flexible PTO
- Group Life Insurance
- EAP through AllOne Health (formerly Carebridge)
What You'll Do
- Own consumer personalization end to end. Define the modeling strategy for recommendations, ranking, and personalization across the home feed, search, product pages, cart, and CRM.
- Build recommenders and rankers. Design candidate generation, retrieval, and learning-to-rank systems that balance relevance, basket size, margin, and real-time inventory availability.
- Lead agentic AI for consumers. Build LLM-powered agents that help customers plan, discover, and reorder (for example, turning "taco night for six" into a ready cart), including tool use, retrieval, evaluation, and guardrails.
- Blend classic ML and LLMs. Decide when a gradient-boosted model, a two-tower network, or an LLM is the right tool, and combine them in production systems.
- Run rigorous experiments. Design A/B tests and offline evaluation frameworks, choose the right metrics, and connect model gains to customer and business outcomes.
- Ship to production. Partner with engineers and product managers on feature pipelines, model serving, latency budgets, and monitoring for drift and quality.
- Set the bar. Mentor senior and staff data scientists, lead design reviews, and raise standards for modeling, code quality, and measurement across the team.
- Shape the roadmap. Work with Product and Engineering leaders to choose the problems with the highest impact and explain trade-offs clearly to executives.
What You'll Bring
- 10+ years of experience in data science or machine learning, or 8+ years with a PhD in a quantitative field (computer science, statistics, operations research, or similar).
- A track record of shipping recommendation, ranking, or personalization systems that measurably moved consumer metrics at scale.
- Deep knowledge of classic machine learning: gradient boosting, collaborative filtering, matrix factorization, learning-to-rank, embeddings, and causal and experimental methods.
- Hands-on experience building agentic AI systems with LLMs, including prompt and tool design, retrieval-augmented generation, multi-step agents, and evaluation of agent quality and safety.
- Expert Python skills and fluency with the core ML stack (for example pandas, scikit-learn, XGBoost or LightGBM, PyTorch or TensorFlow).
- Strong SQL and experience working with large data warehouses; hands-on experience with Snowflake.
- Comfortable using AI coding assistants such as Claude to build models and pipelines faster, with the judgment to review, test, and validate AI-generated code and to protect customer data.
- Solid grounding in A/B testing, offline-to-online metric alignment, and statistical inference.
- Experience leading technical direction across teams without direct authority, and mentoring senior data scientists.
- Clear communication with both technical and non-technical partners, including executives.
Nice to Have
- Experience with Databricks or a similar platform (Spark, MLflow, feature stores) for large-scale training and model management.
- Background in e-commerce, grocery, quick commerce, or other marketplaces where inventory and location shape what customers can buy.
- Experience with real-time or session-based recommendations, contextual bandits, or reinforcement learning.
- Familiarity with agent frameworks and LLM evaluation tooling, and with fine-tuning or distilling models for cost and latency.
- Experience with dbt, Airflow, or similar tools for data pipelines.
- Publications, patents, or open-source work in recommender systems, information retrieval, or applied LLMs.
- Experience eating snacks; agents, this is a relevant skill.
Compensation
- Gopuff pays employees based on market pricing and pay may vary depending on your location. The salary range below reflects what we’d reasonably expect to pay candidates. A candidate’s starting pay will be determined based on job-related skills, experience, qualifications, interview performance, and market conditions. These ranges may be modified in the future. Exceptions may be made for exceptional individuals. For additional information on this role’s compensation package, please reach out to the designated recruiter for this role.
- This role is eligible for a discretionary annual cash bonus and participation in Gopuff’s equity incentive plan.
- Remote Base Salary Range: $180,000 - $240,000
At Gopuff, we know that life can be unpredictable. Sometimes you forget the milk at the store, run out of pet food for Fido, or just really need ice cream at 11 pm. We get it—stuff happens. But that’s where we come in, delivering all your wants and needs in just minutes.
And now, we’re assembling a team of motivated people to help us drive forward that vision to bring a new age of convenience and predictability to an unpredictable world.
Like what you’re hearing? Then join us on Team Blue.
#LI-GOPUFF
*Gopuff is an equal employment opportunity employer, committed to an inclusive workplace where we do not discriminate on the basis of race, sex, gender, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital or familial status, age, ancestry, disability, genetic information, or any other characteristic protected by applicable laws. We believe in diversity and encourage any qualified individual to apply.*We may use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support parts of the hiring process, such as reviewing applications, analyzing resumes, or assessing responses and identifying potential inconsistencies or verification signals in application materials based on available information. These tools assist our recruitment team but do not replace human judgment. Final hiring decisions are ultimately made by humans. If you would like more information about how your data is processed, please contact us.
Salary Context
This $180K-$240K range is above the 75th percentile for Data Scientist roles in our dataset (median: $167K across 172 roles with salary data).
View full Data Scientist salary data →Role Details
About This Role
Data Scientists extract insights and build predictive models from data. In the AI era, many roles now include LLM-powered analytics, automated reporting, and integration with generative AI tools. The role has evolved from 'the person who runs SQL queries' to 'the person who builds AI-powered data products.'
Modern data science roles fall into two camps: analytics-focused (insights, dashboards, experimentation) and ML-focused (building predictive models, recommendation systems, NLP features). The best data scientists can operate in both modes. The AI shift means that even analytics-focused roles now involve building automated insight pipelines using LLMs, going well beyond one-off reports.
Across the 9,653 AI roles we're tracking, Data Scientist positions make up 5% of the market. At Gopuff, this role fits into their broader AI and engineering organization.
Data Scientist roles remain in high demand, though the definition keeps shifting. Companies increasingly want candidates who can bridge traditional statistics with modern ML and LLM capabilities. The 'pure insights' data scientist role is consolidating into analytics engineering, while the 'build models' data scientist role is merging with ML engineering.
What the Work Looks Like
A typical week includes: analyzing experiment results for a product feature launch, building a predictive model for customer churn, creating an automated reporting pipeline using LLM-powered summarization, presenting insights to stakeholders, and cleaning data (always cleaning data). The ratio of analysis to engineering varies by company, but expect both.
Data Scientist roles remain in high demand, though the definition keeps shifting. Companies increasingly want candidates who can bridge traditional statistics with modern ML and LLM capabilities. The 'pure insights' data scientist role is consolidating into analytics engineering, while the 'build models' data scientist role is merging with ML engineering.
Skills Required
Python, SQL, and statistical modeling are the foundation. Increasingly, roles want experience with LLMs for data analysis, automated insight generation, and building AI-powered data products. Familiarity with cloud data platforms (Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks) and ML frameworks (scikit-learn, PyTorch) covers most job requirements.
Experimentation design and causal inference are underrated skills that separate strong candidates. Companies care about whether their product changes cause improvements, and can distinguish causation from correlation. A/B testing methodology, Bayesian statistics, and the ability to communicate uncertainty to non-technical stakeholders are high-value skills.
Good postings specify the data stack, the types of problems you'll work on, and the team structure. Look for companies that differentiate between analytics and ML data science. Vague 'data scientist' postings that list every skill under the sun usually mean the company doesn't know what they need.
Compensation Benchmarks
Data Scientist roles pay a median of $190,000 based on 1,406 positions with disclosed compensation. Senior-level AI roles across all categories have a median of $228,700. This role's midpoint ($210K) sits 11% above the category median. Disclosed range: $180K to $240K.
Across all AI roles, the market median is $213,400. Top-quartile compensation starts at $264,230. The 90th percentile reaches $319,400. For comparison, the highest-paying categories include AI Safety ($253,100) and Research Engineer ($252,000). By seniority level: Entry: $110,408; Mid: $193,200; Senior: $228,700; Director: $272,275; VP: $235,000.
Gopuff AI Hiring
Gopuff has 1 open AI role right now. They're hiring across Data Scientist. Based in Remote, US. Compensation range: $240K - $240K.
Remote Work Context
Remote AI roles pay a median of $185,906 across 2,124 positions. About 6% of all AI roles offer remote work.
Career Path
Common paths into Data Scientist roles include Data Analyst, Statistician, Quantitative Researcher.
From here, career progression typically leads toward Senior Data Scientist, ML Engineer, AI Product Manager.
Start with statistics and SQL. Build a real analysis project on public data that demonstrates insight generation alongside model building. The market values data scientists who can communicate findings clearly to business stakeholders. If you want to move toward ML engineering, invest in software engineering fundamentals and production deployment skills.
What to Expect in Interviews
Interviews combine statistics, coding, and business acumen. SQL is almost always tested, often with complex joins and window functions. Expect a case study round where you're given a business problem and asked to design an analysis plan. Coding rounds focus on pandas, statistical modeling, and visualization. The strongest differentiator is how well you communicate insights to non-technical stakeholders during presentation rounds.
When evaluating opportunities: Good postings specify the data stack, the types of problems you'll work on, and the team structure. Look for companies that differentiate between analytics and ML data science. Vague 'data scientist' postings that list every skill under the sun usually mean the company doesn't know what they need.
AI Hiring Overview
The AI job market has 9,653 open positions tracked in our dataset. By seniority: 193 entry-level, 4,500 mid-level, 3,455 senior, and 1,505 leadership roles (Director, VP, C-Level). Remote roles make up 6% of the market (568 positions). The remaining 9,010 roles require on-site or hybrid attendance.
The market median for AI roles is $213,400. Top-quartile compensation starts at $264,230. The 90th percentile reaches $319,400. Highest-paying categories: AI Safety ($253,100 median, 57 roles); Research Engineer ($252,000 median, 419 roles); AI Engineering Manager ($251,622 median, 51 roles).
Data Scientist roles remain in high demand, though the definition keeps shifting. Companies increasingly want candidates who can bridge traditional statistics with modern ML and LLM capabilities. The 'pure insights' data scientist role is consolidating into analytics engineering, while the 'build models' data scientist role is merging with ML engineering.
The AI Job Market Today
The AI job market spans 9,653 open positions across 16 role categories. The largest categories by volume: AI/ML Engineer (7,301), Data Scientist (441), AI Software Engineer (438). These three account for the majority of open positions, though smaller categories often have higher per-role compensation because of specialized skill requirements.
The seniority mix tells a story about where AI teams are in their maturity. Entry-level roles (193) are outnumbered by mid-level (4,500) and senior (3,455) positions, reflecting that most companies are past the 'build a team from scratch' phase and need experienced engineers who can ship production systems. Leadership roles (Director, VP, C-Level) total 1,505 positions, representing the bottleneck between technical execution and organizational strategy.
Remote work availability sits at 6% of all AI roles (568 positions), with 9,010 requiring on-site or hybrid attendance. The remote share has stabilized after the post-pandemic correction. Senior and specialized roles (Research Scientist, ML Architect) are more likely to be remote-eligible than entry-level positions, partly because experienced hires have more negotiating power and partly because these roles require less hands-on mentorship.
AI compensation is structured in clear tiers. The market median sits at $213,400. Top-quartile roles start at $264,230, and the 90th percentile reaches $319,400. These figures include base salary with disclosed compensation. Total compensation (including equity, bonuses, and sign-on) runs 20-40% higher at companies that offer those components.
Category matters for compensation. AI Safety roles lead at $253,100 median, while Prompt Engineer roles sit at $141,440. The spread between highest and lowest-paying categories reflects the premium on specialized technical skills versus broader analytical roles.
The most in-demand skills across all AI postings: Python (1,605 postings), Aws (916 postings), Azure (724 postings), Rag (634 postings), Gcp (522 postings), Pytorch (495 postings), Kubernetes (384 postings), Claude (383 postings). Python dominates, appearing in the vast majority of role descriptions regardless of category. Cloud platform experience (AWS, GCP, Azure) is the second most common requirement. The newer entrants to the top skills list (RAG, vector databases, LLM APIs) reflect the shift from traditional ML toward generative AI applications.
Frequently Asked Questions
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