Senior 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 Team

At Second Dinner, we believe that 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 strategic and operational decision-making with scientific and methodological rigors. We build data and ML-powered player experience directly into the game. We innovate in analytics tooling and AI 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 collaborate with Product Management, Design, Analytics, 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 the SNAP team to identify growth opportunities for our game and translate them into data science and analytics initiatives.

• Collaborate with relevant disciplines to improve SNAP’s live operations.

• Partner with Analytics and Product Management to identify, define, compute, and validate the relevant and actionable metrics to understand the impact of features and events.

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

• Lead excellence in our approach to experimentation. Lead the design and analysis of experiments.

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

• 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 SQL and Python.

• Extensive experience in data science and analytics.

• Extensive experience in experimentation for consumer-facing product features or live operation (A/B 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.

• Experience with fundamental ETL/ELT.

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

• Passionate player of mobile games.

• Mindset for serving a diverse and global player base.

Nice to Have, But Not Necessary: 

• Ph.D. in Engineering, Physics, Mathematics, Statistics, or related field.

• Experience with AWS, Databricks, and Looker.

• Experience with Apache Spark.

• Experience with Unity and C#/C++.

• Experience collaborating with data engineers and ML engineers on ML/AI systems.

• Experience working in online video games, preferably free-to-play mobile games.

• Passion for making video games.