Senior Data Scientist, Patreon
Feed Relevance
$202-302.5k
+ Equity
2 days a week in office
Funding platform for creatives
Be an early applicant
Funding platform for creatives
1001+ employees
Be an early applicant
$202-302.5k
+ Equity
2 days a week in office
1001+ employees
Company mission
To put creators in control of their work and their futures by strengthening the bond between them and their communities.
Role
Who you are
- Bachelor's degree in Statistics, Economics, Engineering, Mathematics, a related quantitative field, or equivalent practical experience
- You have experience working on a content feed, ranking system, or recommendation platform — you understand retrieval, scoring, and the tradeoffs involved in optimizing for multiple objectives
- You are an experimentation expert, especially with A/B testing on ranking or recommendation changes, and possess a very strong statistical inference skillset
- You have experience building metrics and reporting infrastructure that teams rely on as a source of truth (dashboards, data quality pipelines, alerting)
- You have solid analytical thinking — you dig into cross-platform inconsistencies, engagement anomalies, and data quality issues until you find the root cause
- You have experience making tradeoffs between speed and accuracy in fast-moving, ambiguous environments
- You are a SQL expert and have experience in Python or R to perform statistical analyses
- You have a track record of building strong relationships with product, ML engineering, and data engineering teammates
- You have a growth mindset and aspire to continuously improve your soft and technical skills
- You are an expert communicator with a love for clarity and simplicity
What the job involves
- The Relevance team owns feed ranking and recommendations across Patreon's core surfaces — Home Feed, Membership Feed, Post Page Recommendations, and Niches
- We're building the systems that decide what content fans see and in what order, with the goal of making every fan's experience on Patreon feel personally relevant
- Our cross-functional pod includes ML Engineers, Product Managers, Backend Engineers, Client Engineers, and Data Scientists working together to improve content discovery, deepen fan engagement, and drive creator monetization
- We're at an exciting inflection point: our ranking and recommendation systems are being built largely from scratch, which means you'll have outsized influence on the technical direction and measurement frameworks that shape how millions of fans discover creators
- You'll own the analytics foundation for Patreon's feed — building and maintaining the trustworthy metrics infrastructure that powers dashboards, experiment analysis, ML training data, and leadership reporting
- You'll design and analyze ranking experiments across Home Feed, Membership Feed, Post Page Recs, and Niches, working closely with ML Engineers to evaluate relevance changes and new ranking signals
- You'll conduct exploratory analyses to surface data-backed hypotheses about feed health, content mix, engagement patterns, and discovery conversion — and translate those into actionable ranking improvements
- You'll develop feed health and engagement dashboards with drill-downs by surface, user segment, platform (iOS vs. Android), and feed version
- You'll be a thought partner to Product and ML Engineering, helping the team prioritize ranking experiments and measure what matters — from scroll depth and CTR to Discovery Attributed TPV
- You'll be a cultural and technical leader on the data science team
Our take
Creatives face two major struggles in the online space: getting eyes (or ears) on their work, and getting paid for it. Patreon was founded to solve both problems with a platform that would provide a space for creators to host and promote their work, and offer supporters a way to show their support through a regular paid subscription.
Patreon has been a leader in the content subscription space since its founding, but recently has come under pressure from newer rivals such as Substack and Ko-fi. It has maintained its position by shifting its focus from being primarily a marketplace for supporters to find creatives that interest them to being a toolbox for content creators to promote their work. While the site's creatives value this approach it remains to be seen whether Patreon will be able to return to the growth it was enjoying in previous years.
Despite the inroads made by competitors and a troubling global economic outlook making finances tougher for content creators and their supporters, Patreon is still a leader in its space, with over 250,000 active creators having made $3.5B through the platform.
Steph
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
Company
Funding (last 2 of 6 rounds)
Apr 2021
$155m
SERIES F
Sep 2020
$90m
SERIES E
Total funding: $352.1m
Company benefits
- Health Coverage: Medical, dental, and vision plans are available to our US employees and their dependents. Our plans have a nationwide network and we also cover a primary care concierge membership.
- Balance & Wellness: We offer a generous Flexible Time Off policy, in addition to days throughout the year where everyone takes the same day off to recharge our batteries. Employees and their dependents also have access to therapy, coaching, and Employee Assistance Programs services.
- Family Planning: We provide 20 weeks of paid parental leave, fertility, adoption, and surrogacy benefits, as well as an annual stipend for new additions to your families (including pets!).
- Lifestyle & Learning: You’ll have stipends to fund your personal lifestyle and to support your favorite creators on Patreon, as well as an annual stipend for learning and development.
- Hybrid Work: Our offices are in San Francisco, New York, and Porto. Plus, we have more teammates working remotely around the world.
- Financial Support: We offer employer matching for our retirement plans and Health Savings Account (HSA), as well as access to 1:1 financial guidance with a Certified Financial Planner.
Company HQ
SoMa, San Francisco, CA
Leadership
Jack Conte
(Co-Founder & CEO)Graduated from Stanford with a degree in Music. Created musical content on Youtube as Pomplamoose before founding Patreon.
Sam Yam
(Co-Founder, CTO & President)Worked in Analytics and Engineering roles at Yahoo, Ning and Loopt. Previously founded mobile advertising company AdWhirl, which was acquired by Google.
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