Staff Data Scientist

This is a fully remote opportunity with hybrid available to those local to Boston.

About Gradient AI

Gradient AI is the decision-intelligence partner for the insurance industry, giving customers an advantage in how they make decisions by revealing risk others miss and translating it into stronger performance and real-world impact. Our platform harnesses a vast industry data lake – tens of millions of policies and claims enriched with economic, health, geographic, and demographic signals – integrating cleanly with existing workflows to make complex risk clear, usable, and actionable. Our customers include carriers, brokers, consultants, and specialized insurance organizations across the industry. We are backed by $56M in Series C funding and scaling fast – and it's an exciting time to join the team!

About the Role

We are looking for a Staff Data Scientist to lead complex modeling and analytical projects of broad and diverse scope. You will drive cross-product initiatives with minimal direction, setting the technical approach where problems are ambiguous and raising the bar for the entire data science team.

Responsibilities

• Leverage the best of modern deep learning & large language models with traditional data science techniques to create powerful hybrid models with real uplift.
• Brainstorm, prototype, prove, deploy, and realize the value of your work in market quickly.
• Work on world-class data science problems including big data, federated learning, unstructured data challenges, time series, and sequence modeling.
• Utilize a self-serve buffet of techniques from GLMs to XGBoost to Transformers.
• Tell stories with your data, inspiring trust in customers, stakeholders, and prospects by turning murky math into a powerful message that drives the bottom line.

Qualifications

You thrive in delivering value and improving iteratively. You have a strong preference for Python over R and are proficient with command-line tools. You are skeptical of claims that coding is obsolete and believe in hands-on problem-solving. You take initiative on new, even ambiguous, projects and build systems that outlast your involvement. You contribute to open source, build reusable packages, or design frameworks to elevate your team.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Data Science, Biostatistics, Mathematics, or a similar related field AND 5+ years of professional data science experience building predictive models
• OR Master's or Ph.D in Computer Science, Data Science, Biostatistics, Mathematics, or a similar related field AND 3-5 years of professional data science experience building predictive models
• Advanced proficiency with deep learning frameworks and the core Python data science ecosystem
• Deep understanding of modern AI architectures (e.g., Transformers, Neural Networks, LLMs) and related ML fields
• Strong technical communication and collaboration skills, particularly with nontechnical stakeholders
• Experience working collaboratively with engineering/product teams to meet project goals and timelines
• MLOps and hands-on experience taking models from notebook to production: experiment tracking, packaging, containerization (Docker), model serving and APIs, CI/CD, and pipeline orchestration
• Experience monitoring models in production – tracking data and concept drift, performance degradation, and alerting
• Strong peer leadership and ability to mentor junior data scientists on best practices and problem-solving
• Experience setting and improving team standards

Bonus Qualifications

• Fluency with actuarial methods and working with actuaries
• Familiarity with healthcare and medical data
• Familiarity with underwriting and claims, or predicting long-tailed and/or rare events

Benefits

• A fun, team-oriented startup culture
• Generous stock options – we all get to own a piece of what we're building
• Unlimited vacation days
• Flexible schedule that supports working from home
• Full benefits package including medical, dental, vision, 401k, paid parental leave, and more
• Ample opportunities to learn and take on new responsibilities

Pay

Salary range: $160,000–$193,750 base salary annually. This role is also eligible for an annual performance bonus, equity grant, and a comprehensive benefits package. The actual salary offered will depend on the level at which the candidate is hired, as well as their experience, skills, qualifications, and location. Compensation may grow over time through merit-based increases, promotions, and company-wide adjustments.