Sr Data Scientist

About the role

Electronic Arts creates next-level entertainment experiences that inspire players and fans around the world. Central Technology is the force multiplier, accelerating creative opportunity and progress at EA. EA Security protects our players, employees, products, and platforms by setting security standards, supporting game and enterprise teams, assessing risk, and ensuring compliance with global requirements. This role strengthens system integrity, supports fair play, and enables secure operations at scale.

Responsibilities

• Lead end-to-end data science initiatives, from problem definition and exploratory analysis through model development, evaluation, deployment, and monitoring.
• Design and develop statistical and machine learning models to detect cheating, fraud, account abuse, botting, suspicious gameplay, and other emerging platform risks.
• Build scalable features, risk signals, and detection frameworks using gameplay telemetry, player behavior, account, transaction, and operational data.
• Investigate complex abuse patterns, translate insights into models, rules, dashboards, and recommendations, and continuously improve detection quality by optimizing model performance and reducing false positives.
• Establish best practices for model evaluation, monitoring, drift detection, and impact measurement while partnering with engineering teams to productionize data science solutions.
• Collaborate with product, security, anti-cheat, fraud, game, and operations teams to develop data-driven prevention and enforcement strategies.
• Mentor junior data scientists, promote reusable data science practices, and communicate analytical findings, model tradeoffs, and business impact to technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Requirements

• 7+ years of experience in Data Science, Machine Learning, Applied Statistics, Fraud Detection, Security Analytics, Trust & Safety, or a related analytical field.
• Strong proficiency in Python or R and advanced SQL.
• Experience leading end-to-end machine learning projects from ambiguous problem definition through production deployment.
• Expertise building statistical or machine learning models using large-scale behavioral, transactional, telemetry, account, or security datasets.
• Strong understanding of model evaluation, including precision/recall tradeoffs, threshold optimization, calibration, false positives, monitoring, and model performance measurement.
• Experience engineering features from complex, multi-source datasets and translating business or security problems into scalable analytical solutions.
• Proven ability to partner cross-functionally with engineering, product, security, fraud, or operations teams to deliver production-ready models, dashboards, and decision-support tools.
• Experience mentoring technical teammates and effectively communicating complex analytical insights to diverse audiences.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in gaming, anti-cheat, trust & safety, fraud prevention, cybersecurity, account abuse, bot detection, or other adversarial environments.
• Experience developing detection frameworks, risk scoring models, anomaly detection, graph analytics, clustering, sequence modeling, or human-in-the-loop review systems.
• Familiarity with gameplay telemetry, player behavior analytics, account lifecycle data, commerce systems, or live-service game operations.
• Experience operationalizing ML solutions with cloud and data platforms such as AWS, GCP, Spark, Databricks, Snowflake, Kafka, Airflow, or Kubernetes.
• Experience balancing detection effectiveness with player experience, operational efficiency, and business impact in rapidly evolving threat environments.

Pay

California (depending on location e.g. Los Angeles vs. San Francisco): $165,000 - $256,000 USD.

Benefits

• Paid time off (3 weeks per year to start), 80 hours per year of sick time, 16 paid company holidays per year.
• 10 weeks paid time off to bond with baby.
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance.
• Life insurance and disability insurance.
• 401(k) retirement savings plan.
• Certain roles may be eligible for bonus and other incentive programs.
• Complimentary games.
• Healthcare coverage, mental well-being support, and retirement savings tailored to local needs.