Principal Data Scientist

Who We Are

Second Dinner is an award-winning independent game development studio that is here to make the most fun games in the world. Not super fun games. Not SUPER DUPER fun games. We mean the MOST fun games. In fact, our game MARVEL SNAP has earned multiple Mobile Game of the Year Awards (Game Awards, DICE), Best Strategy Game (IGN), and the Apple Design Award for Innovation!

Second Dinner is a remote-first studio, so while we are headquartered in Irvine, California, most of our team is fully remote across the United States. We want the most talented teammates wherever they call home. A diverse team with varied perspectives makes us a better company and will help us make better games. If you can bring something new to the table and expand our point of view, that's a huge upside. 

Our Data & Analytics Team

At Second Dinner, data plays a crucial role in conveying the voices of our players and informing our decisions, which leads us to great games and player experiences. Our team informs decision-making with scientific and methodological rigor. We build data and ML-powered player experiences directly into the game. We innovate in analytics tooling and data science capabilities to redefine what is possible in game development and operations.

Your Role

You will report to the VP of Data and AI, and your primary responsibility is to drive the data science and experimentation initiatives in Marvel SNAP. You will help level up SNAP team’s capability in rigorous decision-making with data and experiments. You will partner with the AI team to enhance and expand the game for SNAP players. You will collaborate with Product Management (PM), Design, Marketing, and many other disciplines to help make our game wildly fun and drive growth worldwide. If you love crafting world-class game experiences, collaborating with extraordinarily talented cross-functional teams, and creating data science and analytics solutions to impact millions of players directly, then APPLY!!!

What You’ll Do:

• Partner with PM, Design, and Marketing to identify growth opportunities and translate them into data science initiatives.

• Collaborate with PM and Design to improve our game live operations by introducing rigorous quantitative practices.

• Educate and support the SNAP team on decision science and relevant best practices.

• Partner with PM and Analytics to identify, define, compute, and validate the relevant and actionable metrics to measure the success of product features and events.

• Apply analytics, experimentation, and machine learning techniques to empower personalization in our game.

• Lead excellence in our approach to experimentation and hypothesis-driven development. Lead the design, implementation, and analysis of experiments.

• Partner with central technology teams to guide data collection and adopt new solutions that are valuable to SNAP.

• Evangelize data science, analytics, and experimentation. Level up the data literacy of the company.

• Contribute as a key member in determining the vision and strategy for data and analytics.

What You’ll Need:

• Advanced degree in Mathematics, Statistics, Physics, Engineering, or related quantitative field.

• Expertise in Python and SQL.

• Extensive experience in data science and analytics.

• Expensive experience in predictive modeling and applied ML.

• Extensive experience in experimentation for consumer-facing products (A/B test, multivariate test, quasi-experiment, causal inference).

• Experience developing personalized recommendation systems.

• Strong ability to convey technical and statistical concepts clearly and concisely among audiences with different backgrounds.

• Strong ability to partner with stakeholders to lead product improvement and innovations.

• Fundamental understandings for ETL/ELT.

• Demonstrated success in a highly collaborative cross-functional work environment.

• Passionate player of mobile games.

• Mind