Lead Data Scientist, Media Group Decision Sciences

Company Description

NBCUniversal is one of the world's leading media and entertainment companies. We create world-class content, which we distribute across our portfolio of film, television, and streaming, and bring to life through our theme parks and consumer experiences. We own and operate leading entertainment and news brands, including NBC, NBC News, MSNBC, CNBC, NBC Sports, Telemundo, NBC Local Stations, Bravo, USA Network, and Peacock, our premium ad-supported streaming service. We produce and distribute premier filmed entertainment and programming through Universal Filmed Entertainment Group and Universal Studio Group, and have world-renowned theme parks and attractions through Universal Destinations & Experiences. NBCUniversal is a subsidiary of Comcast Corporation.

Our impact is rooted in improving the communities where our employees, customers, and audiences live and work. We have a rich tradition of giving back and ensuring our employees have the opportunity to serve their communities. We champion an inclusive culture and strive to attract and develop a talented workforce to create and deliver a wide range of content reflecting our world.

Comcast NBCUniversal has announced its intent to create a new publicly traded company ('Versant') comprised of most of NBCUniversal's cable television networks, including USA Network, CNBC, MSNBC, Oxygen, E!, SYFY and Golf Channel along with complementary digital assets Fandango, Rotten Tomatoes, GolfNow, GolfPass, and SportsEngine. The well-capitalized company will have significant scale as a pure-play set of assets anchored by leading news, sports and entertainment content. The spin-off is expected to be completed during 2025.

Job Description

The Media Group at NBCU supports a powerhouse collection of consumer-first brands including Peacock, NBC, Bravo, NBC Sports, and NBCU International. With unequalled scale, our teams make the most out of every opportunity to collaborate and learn from one another. We’re always looking for ways to innovate faster, accelerate our growth and consistently offer the very best in consumer experience. But most of all, we’re backed by a culture of respect. We embrace authenticity and inspire people to thrive.

As part of the Decision Sciences team, the Lead Data Scientist will be responsible for creating analytical solutions for one or more verticals of NBCU’s video streaming service including, but not limited to, dynamic pricing, messaging optimization, CRM solutions, and customer value assessment.

In this role, the Lead Data Scientist will use advanced data science methodologies including causal uplift modeling, contextual and non-contextual bandits, experimentation, and Gen AI (LLMs). They will work closely with business owners, teammates and engineers to build state-of-the-art algorithmic targeting solutions for a dynamic media platform. They will be responsible for building, maintaining, and testing robust production ready systems that may need to serve low latency predictions.

Responsibilities include, but are not limited to:

• Contribute to and lead projects related to the development of analytical models using machine learning, causal uplift modeling, and Gen AI techniques.
• Provide mentorship to junior teammates via pairing and code reviews
• Effectively communicates work and project implications to stakeholders of varying technical expertise
• Conduct rigorous cross-validation, backtesting and off policy evaluation of model performance.
• Familiarity with CI/CD processes and contributes to a sustainable and robust codebase
• Understanding of batch jobs/data pipelines and is comfortable deploying through these systems (i.e. Airflow, Luigi, Composer)
• Build and interact with production systems for serving machine learning predictions.

Qualifications

• Advanced (Master or PhD) degree with specialization in Statistics, Computer Science, Data Science, Economics, Mathematics, Operations Research or another quantitative field or equivalent.
• Minimum of 5 years of combined data science experience within industry or research.
• Has solid knowledge of standard data science and statistical techniques
• Has built machine learning models and frameworks with a consideration to training, prediction time, and their implications on production systems
• Has strong knowledge of one of causal inference techniques, Gen AI (LLM) implementation, or contextual bandits
• Experience implementing scalable systems (Google Cloud preferred).
• Experience with data visualization tools and techniques.
• Ability to turn stakeholder ideas into rigorous solutions
• Proficient in Python and SQL

Desired Characteristics

• Working experience with product teams to deploy prescriptive machine learning models to drive one or more KPIs