Senior Data Scientist, Places at Raya

About Raya and Places

Raya is a technology company focused on providing utility, building products that measure success by genuine value rather than time spent online. Its apps, Raya and Places, are tools for discovering and accessing exciting people and places globally. By combining great software with a membership-based community built on trust, curation, and authenticity, Raya aims to offer something different from infinite content and low quality AI generated material.

Places' mission is to help discerning global travelers find their favorite places wherever they go through expert curation and community trust.

About the Role

As a Data Scientist on the Places by Raya team, you will play a key role in shaping how the Places app uses data to drive business decisions. This is a hands-on position that combines data modeling and reporting with product analysis and experimentation. Although the product has existed since 2023, the culture feels much like a new startup, with leadership heavily invested in this product space. This is the first dedicated Data Scientist role for Places, supported by a dedicated Data Engineer.

We are seeking an entrepreneurial and driven data scientist to identify opportunities to improve retention and help the team evaluate and act on them. This is a great role for someone who wants to build data solutions from the ground up and help shape how the entire team uses insights. You should be able to articulate best practices, develop new analytical frameworks that tie user actions to outcomes, and strike the right balance between analytical rigor and pragmatic business action. Successful candidates will demonstrate technical skills, product expertise, and business acumen, and be enthusiastic about making a positive impact through timely execution. You are passionate about leveraging data to drive product changes with quality and agility and can demonstrate sound judgment under uncertainty.

Responsibilities

• Own the definition and evolution of success metrics for all user facing surfaces, including tradeoffs between short term and long term member value.
• Define and maintain business metrics, semantic layers, and data models to ensure consistency and trust across the Places team.
• Own, in partnership with Data Engineering, the translation of product requirements into scalable, reliable data assets that empower efficient decision making.
• Influence product direction by uncovering and translating insights into clear recommendations that shape roadmap prioritization.
• Build out a culture of high fidelity experimentation to scale wins quickly.
• Use visualisations to convey nuance with clarity.
• Maintain an AI native mindset with hands-on experience using LLMs, agents, and modern AI tools to automate analysis, accelerate experimentation, and build scalable decision support workflows.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of data science and product analytics experience.
• BS and/or MS in a quantitative discipline such as statistics, operations research, computer science, engineering, applied mathematics, physics, or economics.
• Familiarity delivering data products through partnership with Data and product engineering teams.
• Strong technical fluency with analytical tools such as SQL and Python, or equivalent experience using data to answer open ended business questions.
• Strong applied statistics background, including hypothesis testing, confidence intervals, power analysis, and causal inference techniques.
• Familiarity with modern analytics and experimentation tools.
• Familiarity with consumer focused products.
• Strong proactive verbal and written communication skills, with the ability to convey rigorous statistical concepts to non experts.
• Practical AI fluency and curiosity about how modern AI tools can improve analytical workflows, strategic synthesis, and decision support.
• Bonus points for familiarity with optimization of performance marketing efforts.