Senior Data Scientist, Growth & Retention
$160k - $185k USD
About CookUnity:
Food has lost its soul to modern convenience. And with it, it has lost the power to nourish, inspire, and connect us. So in 2018, CookUnity was founded as the first-of-its-kind platform that connects the world with the source of truly great food: chefs. Today, CookUnity delivers 50 million meals a year from the industry’s best chefs to homes all over the country. Fresh. Ready-to-eat. And crafted with the passion that nourishes body and soul.
Unwilling to stop there, CookUnity is expanding beyond delivery to become an ever-innovating marketplace focused on our singular mission: empower Chefs to nourish the world.
If that mission has you hungry in more ways than one, you’ve found the right job posting.
About the Role
We’re hiring for an experienced ML-focused Data Scientist to own growth-oriented modeling across the customer lifecycle - acquisition, activation, retention, resurrection and monetization. You’ll work alongside other data scientist to design, validate, and productionize statistical and ML systems (pLTV, churn/survival, uplift/incrementality, lookalikes, clustering/embeddings, NBA/ranking) that directly drive growth. This is a hands-on role for someone with strong mathematical/statistical foundations, broad modeling experience, and pragmatic MLOps chops who can lead experiments and partner closely with Marketing, Engineering, CRM, and Product.
What you’ll do…
- Lifecycle modeling: Build and maintain predictive LTV, churn (including survival/time-to-event), order-rate, and resurrection models that feed acquisition, CRM, and retention strategies.
- Acquisition & lookalikes: Create lookalike / propensity models for paid channels and audience construction; optimize CAC vs LTV tradeoffs.
- Next-Best-Action & personalization: Develop NBA/ranking models, small-scale recommenders and embedding-based similarity systems to increase activation and orders.
- Unsupervised & representation learning: Lead segmentation, clustering, embeddings and representation work that create actionable cohorts and features.
- Production & MLOps: Own the full model lifecycle - training pipelines, CI/CD, model registries, containerized deployment, monitoring, retraining and drift detection; partner with engineers to operationalize models into CRM, marketplace and paid channels.
- Model governance & reproducibility: Ensure models are well-tested, explainable, calibrated, and auditable; document assumptions, limitations and business mappings.
- Cross-functional influence: Translate technical work into product recommendations, dashboards and clear narratives for Growth, Marketing and Engineering. Mentor peers and raise modeling and MLOps standards.
Required qualifications
- 5-8+ years in data science, applied ML or statistics, with a track record of shipping production models.
- Strong math & statistics: probability, inference, regression, survival analysis/time-to-event, causal reasoning, and familiarity with statistical modeling tradeoffs.
- End-to-end ML experience: experience building, validating and deploying classification/regression/ensemble/deep models; comfort with embeddings and representation learning.
- MLOps & production skills: pragmatic experience with model CI/CD, model registries (MLFlow or similar), containerization (Docker), orchestration (Airflow), and runtime infra (K8s / ECS).
- Software engineering & tooling: Python (pandas, scikit-learn, XGBoost/LightGBM, PyTorch/TensorFlow optional), strong code hygiene, testing and reproducibility.
- Product & stakeholder collaboration: excellent communication, ability to embed with Growth/CRM/Marketing and translate models into product decisions.
- Education: BS in a quantitative field required; MS/PhD in statistics, math, CS, economics or similar preferred.
Nice-to-haves
- Experience in subscription marketplaces, food-tech, or consumer marketplaces.
- Familiarity with feature stores, Snowflake/BigQuery, and production monitoring tools.
- Experience with causal libraries (EconML), uplift frameworks, or survival modeling packages.
- Prior work on small-scale recommender systems, embeddings, or NLP personalization.
Learn More About CookUnity
We believe great leadership starts with alignment on vision, values, and ways of working. To give you deeper insight into who we are and what we’re looking for, we invite you to explore: CookUnity's Leadership Principles – The values and behaviors that guide how we operate, collaborate, and scale.
We hope this provides valuable insight into our culture and product vision. If this excites you, we’d love to connect!
Benefits
🩺 Health Insurance coverage
🌅 401k Plan
⛱ Unlimited PTO
🗓️ 5- year Sabbatical: After 5 years with CookUnity, you get a 4-week paid sabbatical
🐣 Paid Family leave
🕯 Compassionate Leave: 3-5 days each time the need arises
🥘 A generous amount of CookUnity credits to enjoy our amazing meals, added to your account, monthly
🧘🏽♀️ Wellness perks: access to a nutritional coach and fitness subsidies to build a healthy lifestyle
👩🏾🏫 Personalized Spanish coach
🌟 Awesome opportunity to join a company that is looking to change how we eat and how chefs work!
Compensation
All final pay rates will be determined by candidates experience, knowledge, skills, and abilities of the applicant, internal equity, and alignment with market data.Pay Range for this position
$160,000—$185,000 USD
If you’re interested in this role, please submit your application, and if we think you might be a fit, we'll get in touch with you. Thank you for your time!
CookUnity is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We are dedicated to creating a community of inclusion and an environment free from discrimination or harassment. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, citizenship status, protected veteran status, genetic information, or physical or mental disability.
A quick note for all candidates
We’ve recently seen an increase in recruitment scams across the industry, and we want to make sure you (and your data) stay safe while applying to CookUnity. We also want you to know that we take this seriously — sometimes, as part of our process, we may ask for a brief “proof of humanity” to confirm that we’re connecting with a real person, not an impersonator. Here are a few tips to help you protect yourself and know what to expect from us:
- Apply only through our official channels. All open roles are listed on our official careers page: careers.cookunity.com
- Our recruiters are real people — and easy to verify. You can always find them on LinkedIn with verified profiles. If you’re unsure, feel free to reach out to us on our official LinkedIn Company Page.
- We only communicate through official CookUnity channels. That means emails ending in
@cookunity.comand interviews held through official company platforms (Google Meet or Zoom) — never WhatsApp, Telegram, or SMS. - We’ll never ask for payment or personal financial details. If anyone does, please don’t share any information and let us know right away.
If something ever feels off or you’re unsure about a message, we’d much rather you double-check with us. You can always contact us directly through any of our social media channels. We appreciate your interest in joining CookUnity — and we care about keeping your experience (and safety) as genuine as possible.