Data Scientist I

Tavern Research is a political tech startup that builds tools and insights to help our customers win elections and make better decisions. We specialize in scaling expert human work, like content generation and survey research. We're a venture-backed, mission driven, fast-moving, mostly technical team focused on supporting winning campaigns. Everything else is on our website. If you still have questions, let us know when you apply!

You’re endlessly curious, adaptable, and detail-obsessed in the best way. You love rolling up your sleeves to wrestle messy data into shape, making it clean, usable, and ready to reveal its secrets. You’re excited to learn from seasoned teammates and to contribute to tightly scoped projects where precision and efficiency really matter.

You thrive in a collaborative, friendly, and nerdy environment where people genuinely love what they do. You chase the thrill of deep focus, appreciate your teammates’ brainpower, and hunger for the rush of solving problems no one else has dared to tackle. These are the kinds of challenges that stay with you—in the shower, as you fall asleep, tugging at your brain in the best possible way.

You’re interested in politics, and the ways in which public opinion is created and shaped. You understand the power of narratives to shape the world around us, and want to play a part in the high-stakes, real-world battle over hearts and minds.

Most importantly, you bring humility, patience, and a commitment to detail. You bring focus and efficiency to your work, knowing when to go deep and when to ship ‘good enough.’ You see this role as a chance to sharpen your craft, learn fast, and make a real contribution to high-stakes, real-world problems.

At Tavern Research, we’re building models to understand and influence how people form opinions online. That means taking on problems like tracing how narratives spread through social platforms, or analyzing how different messages land with different audiences. The data is messy, the questions are ambiguous, and the stakes are high.

As a member of the modeling team, your role is to help make this work possible. You’ll dive into raw, noisy datasets to clean, structure, and prepare them for analysis. You’ll run exploratory analyses to surface patterns, build features, and support experiments. And you’ll contribute to well-defined modeling tasks, helping turn difficult, open-ended questions into tangible, testable results.

From day one, you’ll be hands-on with real-world data and problems that matter. You’ll have support from senior team members, but you’ll also be expected to bring rigor, patience, and persistence to your work. Over time, as your skills deepen, you’ll have opportunities to take ownership of increasingly complex modeling projects, building toward the point where you can design and lead experiments yourself.

We value in-person collaboration and expect employees to work regularly from our Chicago office.

We know it’s rare to check every box. If you meet most of these, we encourage you to apply:

To be explicit: you don’t need a degree to work here. You just need to be good at the things we’re asking from you.