Staff Data Scientist

The Opportunity

We are seeking a Staff Data Scientist to join our Payment Modeling team and lead the development of our research capabilities within the Virtual Research Data Center (VRDC). This role is critical for advancing our understanding of provider and practice performance, which directly informs the pricing of our value-based care contracts. You will be a key technical leader within our collaborative Payment Modeling team, reporting to a Senior Manager of Data Science and working alongside other data scientists, software engineers, and financial analysts.

As a hands-on builder, you will implement the analytics backbone we use to perform research inside the VRDC and use that infrastructure to deliver advanced financial and utilization metrics. You will partner closely with Finance and fellow Data Scientists to understand how practices manage their panels and convert those insights into scalable metrics. With Product and Engineering, you will synthesize your findings into decision tools that power our risk‑management products.

Initially, you will be responsible for building the foundational infrastructure, standard operating procedures, and best practices to enable pricing/underwriting based on Medicare data. As a key technical leader, you will design greenfield systems, architect experimentation pipelines, and ultimately help improve the performance of the 500+ models that predict the financial viability of practices in value-based care. This role demands deep skill developing in Python, strong research taste, and a strong vision for systems and software architecture to support an enterprise-quality underwriting stack.

Who We Are

Pearl Health is dedicated to empowering primary care providers, health systems, and physician-led networks to succeed in the shift to value-based care. Our platform delivers the technology, financial tools, and expert services that enable practices to provide more proactive, effective care to their Medicare patients, ultimately lowering costs and improving health outcomes.

Founded in 2020, we are a team of healthcare and technology innovators backed by premier investors like Andreessen Horowitz, Viking Global Investors, and AlleyCorp. We partner with thousands of providers across 44 states to build a more sustainable future for American healthcare.

What a Staff Data Scientist Means to Us...

• Development and Deployment of a Stable, Tested, Extendable, and Compliant Research Infrastructure: You will build and maintain an enterprise-grade infrastructure in Python, SQL, and PySpark that will allow us to conduct cutting-edge research in the Virtual Research Data Center (VRDC) and internal systems. This work will involve architecting the system in partnership with data scientists, finance, and other technical leaders at Pearl.

• Conduct Cutting Edge ML Research at the Intersection of Healthcare and Finance: Value-based care only works if the patterns of influence among care management, healthcare outcomes, and financial payments are well understood. Pearl is engaged in research to uncover industry-leading understanding of these patterns so that we can leverage that understanding to orient our company strategy and go to market motion.

• Mentorship & Talent Path: You will be a technical leader from day one by setting the bar for technical excellence and through mentorship of your peers.

Why You'll Love This Role:

• Unparalleled Impact: Your work will directly shape the financial core of our business and influence how thousands of providers are paid, ultimately improving patient care.

• Greenfield Opportunity: You won't just be maintaining systems; you'll be the chief architect of our VRDC research environment, building critical infrastructure from the ground up.

• Unique Data Access: You'll work within the CMS Virtual Research Data Center, one of the richest healthcare datasets available, to solve problems at the intersection of healthcare and finance.

• Technical Autonomy: As a technical leader, you will have the freedom to define research trajectories and make key architectural decisions, with your work directly influencing company strategy.

Who You Are…

• A Ph.D. or Master's degree in a quantitative field such as statistics, applied mathematics, computer science, engineering, economics, or a related discipline, and 8+ years of experience in performing results-driven quantitative analysis.

• Exceptional system architecture vision and software engineering skills, with proven experience designing and building scalable data science systems.

• Strong progr