Senior Data Scientist, The Athletic
Subscription based publisher of sports content
Open for applications
Subscription based publisher of sports content
501-1000 employees
Open for applications
501-1000 employees
Company mission
To produce smarter coverage for die-hard fans and redefine the way fans get access to sports content by flipping the normal model for sports journalism.
Role
Who you are
- 4-6 years of experience as a data scientist with a proven ability to apply scientific methods to solve real-world problems on web scale data
- Strong working knowledge of a scripting language like R or Python and how to use it to train machine learning models and put them into production
- A broad understanding of SQL with an ability to efficiently pull and write to our data warehouses
- An understanding of subscription media and recommendation engines, with the ability to turn it into insights and optimizations
- Knowledge of statistical principles and how they apply to predictive modeling
- Ability to drive projects with minimal guidance and prioritize high-impact work
- Strong verbal and written communication skills with ability to build cross-functional relationships
- Can explain sophisticated concepts to diverse audiences and craft compelling stories with data
What the job involves
- We are looking for a senior data scientist who will bring a deep understanding of our sportswriting, our in-game experience, and the way our subscribers use The Athletic to help us make our best-in-class product even better
- In this role, you will work closely with our data, product, growth, and engineering teams to develop advanced machine learning models
- These models will help us understand our business, optimize and automate our workflows, and have our product make smarter recommendations. As a member of our small data science team, your work will have a significant impact at The Athletic
- Design, build, and implement mathematical models to drive key long-term product goals, like training a model that predicts which of our free users are most likely to subscribe, or recommending the right articles to the right users at the right time
- Lead projects with hands-on analysis and modeling, drawing from multiple analytical methods to choose the right tool and right level of complexity appropriate for the job
- Use quantitative analysis to deeply understand what our users are saying, and to develop recommendations based on that analysis
- Design and develop data science pipelines in production
- Guide complex experiments
- Cultivate an outstanding data science environment
Our take
The Athletic provides authentic, in-depth coverage written by journalists who know the teams they write about inside out. Its model bucks the trend of traditional sports journalism outfits by asking for a subscription rather than relying on ad-revenue.
Despite initial doubts that users would be willing to pay for sports journalistic content, the Athletic has found significant success and was acquired by the New York times in 2022.
This collaboration was criticised at the time by investors who believed that the Athletic was undersold. However, despite The Athletic operating at a loss since the takeover, it's clear that the New York Times perceives the subscription magazine as a long-term investment, predicting that it will be operating at a profit within the next 4 years. This will be aided by accelerated customer growth and the growing trend of subscription-based sports news.
Kirsty
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
Company
Funding (last 2 of 7 rounds)
Jan 2020
$50m
SERIES D
May 2019
$21.8m
SERIES C
Total funding: $139.7m
Company HQ
Financial District, San Francisco, CA
Leadership
Adam Hansmann
(President & Co-Founder)Previously a McKinsey Business Analyst and then Associate at Calera Capital.
Alex Mather
(CEO & Co-Founder)Vice President at startup building a community for athletes called Strava before founding The Athletic
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