Staff Data Scientist
Ethos Life
About the role
About Ethos
Ethos (Nasdaq: $LIFE) is a leading life insurance technology company on a mission to protect families by democratizing access to life insurance and empowering agents at scale. With its robust three-sided technology platform, Ethos is transforming the life insurance experience for consumers, agents, and carriers alike. Ethos offers instant, accessible products and a seamless online process that requires no medical exams and just a few health questions; it eliminates traditional barriers, making it easier than ever for everyone to protect their families. Ethos is redefining how life insurance is bought, sold, and underwritten.
About the role
We're looking for a Staff Data Scientist to own the product modeling roadmap and contribute to marketing measurement. You'll design, build, and deploy production ML models, partnering closely with PMs to scope and prioritize. The right candidate defines what to model before anyone asks, stress-tests their own assumptions, and communicates uncertainty in terms stakeholders can act on.
Duties and Responsibilities:
Own the end-to-end lifecycle of ML models powering product experiences, coverage recommenders, user-to-channel routing, and agent assignment logic
Engineer features, prototype experiments, and ship iterative model improvements to production
Work with engineering and PMs to define how model scores are consumed in real-time product surfaces
Qualifications and Skills:
5+ years in data science or ML at established firms or high-growth tech
Strong command of supervised learning and recommendation systems; you've shipped production models, not just notebooks
Proficiency in Python (pymc, scikit-learn, XGBoost/LightGBM) and SQL
Hands-on Bayesian experience: prior elicitation, posterior inference, and experiment design
Experience deploying production models integrated with consumer-facing products
Strong communication skills; able to translate model behavior and uncertainty into stakeholder recommendations
Bias toward ownership; you identify what needs to be built before anyone files a ticket
Recommender systems or personalization at scale
Causal inference: diff-in-diff, uplift modeling, instrumental variables
Marketing mix modeling, media attribution, or incrementality measurement
Experience in insurtech, fintech, or other regulated industries
dbt or data pipeline experience
MLflow, feature stores, or other ML infrastructure tooling
Gets in the weeds without losing the bigger picture
Knows the tradeoffs between simple heuristics and ML solutions and picks the right tool for the job
Aligns model performance metrics to business objectives and combines multiple models into a coherent solution
Raises the team's data science bar through code review, documentation, and mentorship
#LI-Remote #LI-TL1
The US national base salary range for this full-time position is $127,000 - $224,000. Our salary ranges are determined by role, level, and location. The range displayed on each job posting reflects the minimum and maximum target for new hire salaries for the position across all US locations. Within the range, individual pay is determined by work location and additional factors, including job-related skills, experience, and relevant education or training.
Please note that the compensation details listed in US role postings reflect the base salary only and do not include applicable bonus, equity, or benefits.
You can find further details of our US benefits at https://www.ethoslife.com/careers/
Don’t meet every single requirement? If you’re excited about this role but your past experience doesn’t align perfectly with every qualification in the job description, we encourage you to apply anyway. At Ethos we are dedicated to building a diverse, inclusive and authentic workplace.
We are an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status. Pursuant to the SF Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider employment for qualified applicants with arrests and conviction records.
To learn more about what information we collect and how it may be used, please refer to our California Candidate Privacy Notice.
Recruitment Notice: Please be aware of recruitment scams. All legitimate communication from our team will only come from email addresses ending in @ethos.com or @getethos.com.
We will never ask for payment, banking details, or sensitive personal information during the hiring process. If you are contacted by someone claiming to represent us from a different email address, please treat it as fraudulent.
Responsibilities
- Own the end-to-end lifecycle of machine learning models for product experiences, coverage recommendations, user-to-channel routing, and agent assignment.
- Engineer features, prototype experiments, and iteratively improve models in production.
- Partner with product managers and engineers to scope modeling work and determine how model scores are used in real-time product experiences.
- Contribute to marketing measurement.
- Raise the data science team's standards through code review, documentation, and mentorship.
Qualifications
- 5+ years of data science or machine learning experience at established firms or high-growth technology companies.
- Strong command of supervised learning and recommendation systems, with experience shipping production models.
- Proficiency in Python, including tools such as PyMC, scikit-learn, XGBoost, or LightGBM, and in SQL.
- Hands-on Bayesian experience, including prior elicitation, posterior inference, and experiment design.
- Experience deploying production models integrated with consumer-facing products.
- Strong communication skills and ability to translate model behavior and uncertainty into actionable stakeholder recommendations.
- Ownership mindset, strong judgment about when to use machine learning versus simpler approaches, and ability to align model metrics with business objectives.
- Preferred experience in recommender systems, personalization, causal inference, marketing measurement, regulated industries, dbt or data pipelines, and ML infrastructure tools.
Skills mentioned
About Ethos Life
Ethos (Nasdaq: $LIFE) makes getting life insurance instant and easy. Our approach blends technology and industry expertise, and the human touch to deliver an incredible life insurance experience. We are one of the largest U.S. life insurance issuers. We continue to scale quickly and are looking for passionate Ethosaurs to protect the next million families.