Lead Data Scientist, Product
Job Description
Our vision is to build the next generation platform to enable easy and fast creation of audio and video content powered by cutting-edge AI. Building a revolutionary way to record, transcribe, edit, and mix spoken audio and video comes with a series of unique challenges and requires solving hard and complex problems.
As a lead product data scientist on the team, you will play a critical role in shaping our growth strategy, up-leveling our experimentation culture, and scaling our business.
What You’ll Do
- Conduct in-depth analysis to shape product PLG motion and B2B strategy.
- Develop deep understanding of the product ecosystem and identify opportunities to drive activation, engagement, and monetization through actionable insights.
- Leveraging AI tools to build and maintain self-service analytics enabling stakeholders to access reliable metrics, size opportunities, design experiments, and interpret results independently.
- Improve execution rigor of product teams by owning success metrics and opportunity sizing.
- Brain buddy with product and engineering teams for day-to-day experiment design, deployment, and analysis. Provide creative solutions for tricky experimentation scenarios.
- Evolve experimentation culture and practices within the company.
What You Bring
- 5–8 years of experience in a Data Scientist or similar role.
- 3+ years working in a growth function.
- Strong business and product intuition to identify opportunities in the growth ecosystem.
- Strong knowledge of statistical analysis and A/B tests.
- Strong SQL skills and proficient in at least one programming language such as Python or R.
- Excellent communication and collaboration skills.
- Curiosity, savviness to navigate in a dynamic environment, and a growth mindset.
- Having worked at a fast-growing start-up is a plus.
The base salary range for this role is $200,000 - $250,000/year. Final offer amounts will carefully consider multiple factors, including prior experience, expertise, location, level, and may vary from the amount above.
About Descript
Descript is building a simple, intuitive, fully-powered editing tool for video and audio — an editing tool built for the age of AI. We are a team of 150 and the backing of some of the world's greatest investors (OpenAI, Andreessen Horowitz, Redpoint Ventures, Spark Capital).
Descript is the special company that's in possession of both product market fit and the raw materials (passionate user community, great product, large market) for growth, but is still early enough that each new employee has a measurable influence on the direction of the company.
Benefits include a generous healthcare package, 401k matching program, catered lunches, and flexible vacation time. Our headquarters are located in the Mission District of San Francisco, CA. We're hiring for a mix of remote roles and hybrid roles. For those who are remote, we have a handful of opportunities throughout the year for in person collaboration. For our hybrid roles, we're flexible, and you're an adult—we don't expect or mandate that you're in the office every day. We do believe there are valuable and serendipitous moments of discovery and collaboration that come from working together in person.
Descript is an equal opportunity workplace—we are dedicated to equal employment opportunities regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity, or Veteran status. We believe in actively building a team rich in diverse backgrounds, experiences, and opinions to better allow our employees, products, and community to thrive.
How to Stand Out
- Build a mini‑case study using Descript’s public API (or a scraped dataset of transcribed audio/video) where you clean and enrich the data in Excel (pivot tables, Power Query) and then model user activation funnels; include the Excel workbook and a short Jupyter notebook walkthrough in your portfolio to demonstrate both the required tool skill and product‑focused insight generation.
- Prepare a “PLG vs. B2B” playbook: map out at least three concrete growth levers (e.g., free‑tier feature adoption, team‑seat conversion, API‑driven integration) and quantify potential impact with metrics you’d extract from product logs (DAU, activation %). Bring this as a one‑page PDF to the interview to show you can shape strategy from day one.
- Showcase your experimentation leadership by describing a past A/B test end‑to‑end (hypothesis, randomization design, statistical method, Excel‑based power analysis, result interpretation) and explicitly tie it to a product decision that moved a KPI. Emphasize how you’d set up a similar rigorous framework for Descript’s “record‑edit‑publish” workflow.
- Highlight remote collaboration expertise: list the exact tools you use (e.g., GitHub for version‑controlled notebooks, Slack/Discord for async discussions, Miro for experiment design, and Excel Online for shared data reviews). Prepare a short demo or screen‑recorded walkthrough of a shared Excel dashboard you built for cross‑functional stakeholders.
- When discussing salary, reference Descript’s recent funding round and market benchmarks for Lead Data Scientists in SaaS/AI (e.g., base $180‑210k + 0.2‑0.4 % equity). Prepare a one‑pager that aligns your proven impact on revenue growth (e.g., “+15 % conversion on free‑to‑paid cohort”) with the compensation range you’re targeting.
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